Bees can be trained to sniff out flowers

Scientists coach honeybees with technique that could enable crops to be pollinated more efficiently and boost farmer’s fortunes.

Scientists introduced food to a hive with a substance that mimicked the smell of sunflowers, in a process that could be likened to training a dog to follow a scent. Picture: News Corp

It has long been understood that if you want a dog to hunt you can train it to follow a particular scent. Now it appears that something very similar is true of bees.

Scientists have taught honeybees to seek out the odour of a specific species of flower. The researchers behind the work believe that coaching the insects in this way could enable crops to be pollinated more efficiently.

The experiment began with scientists introducing food to a hive that included a substance that mimicked the smell of sunflowers. The bees, it seems, came to recognise the odour and to associate it with sustenance.

When they later went out foraging, “pioneer bees” quickly homed in on a nearby patch of sunflowers and fed from them. When they returned to the colony they performed what is known as a “waggle dance” - a pattern of shaking and wiggling that effectively transmitted the co-ordinates of the sunflowers to other worker bees.

Walter Farina from the University of Buenos Aires, who led the study, said that the process could be likened to training a dog to follow a scent. “It is a simple olfactory conditioning procedure,” he said.

“We developed a simple synthetic odorant mixture that bees confused with the natural floral scent of the sunflower, an economically important and highly pollinator-dependent crop.”

The bees’ training led them to visit sunflowers more often than a similar colony that had not been fed with the specially scented pollen. The trained bees also brought more sunflower pollen back to the hive.

At a time when pollinating insects are in decline in many regions, the researchers believe that the technique could help boost the fortunes of farmers. The bees’ preference for sunflower pollen led to an increase in the flowers’ production of seeds by up to 57 per cent.

These increases were far greater than those that could be achieved through increased use of fertilisers or pesticides, Professor Farina said. “We are studying other pollinator-dependent crops such as almond, pear and apple, with the aim to develop new odour mimics to achieve the same goal, that is to improve pollination efficiency in the target crop.”

The findings were published yesterday (Thursday) in the journal Current Biology.

The feeding habits of bees are being studied as numbers of many types of the insects tumble. A study published last year found that wild bees were disappearing from swathes of Britain. It found that each square kilometre of the UK had lost an average of 11 species of bee and hoverfly since 1980. The geographical range of the average species had declined by 25 per cent, with habitat loss and pesticides believed to have decimated populations.

For a subset of species thought to be vulnerable to climate change, which prefer cooler upland regions such as the Peak District of northern England, it had fallen by more than 50 per cent.

Not all bees were in retreat, however. Several species that play important roles in commercial crop pollination, such as red-tailed and buff-tailed bumblebees, had extended their ranges. It was possible, the researchers said, that these “dominant pollinators” had benefited from government incentives to farmers to plant wildflower strips at the margins of their fields.

Another recent study, in California, found that different bumblebee species sought out different assortments of flowers, even though the bees were foraging across the same landscape. The US Forest Service has begun to refer to the study when restoring or managing meadows and other habitats.

MUCH MORE THAN DRONES

- Honeybees can match symbols and quantities, much as humans do with Arabic and Roman numerals

- There is evidence that well-trained honeybees can count to five

- They have been taught to play a rudimentary form of football

- Scientists found they could learn to recognise human faces, as long as they thought they were flowers

- Experiments suggest that bees understand the concept of zero, which some experts argue eluded humans until the 7th century

The Times