Caffeine Boosts Bees’ Focus and Helps Them Learn
The modern supermarket offers a rainbow cornucopia of fruits and vegetables. Peppers, avocadoes, strawberries, cucumbers—they’re all made possible by bees. But “there just aren’t enough pollinators in the natural world” to take care of our global crop load, says Sarah Arnold, an ecologist at the University of Greenwich. So farmers release commercially reared bees by the thousands onto their fields, where the insects buzz along diligently and pollinate billions of dollars’ worth of crops every year. As bees dip into flowers to find food, their fuzzy little bodies pick up powdery pollen that gets spread when they visit the next flower, and the next, and the next.
But commercial bees sometimes stray from farm fields to peruse nearby wildflowers. Now, scientists have found that—like for many humans—a jolt of caffeine helps bees stay on task and get the job done more efficiently. Arnold and her colleagues showed that feeding bumblebees caffeine while exposing them to a target floral scent encourages them to seek out that smell when they leave the nest. The caffeinated bees visit the target-scented flowers more quickly and often than those without that extra boost. The findings could be applied to industrial agriculture to train bees to stay more on track, the team reported Wednesday in Current Biology.
Pollinators had already been known to learn which flowers to visit by being exposed to scents inside the nest, says Jessamyn Manson, an ecologist at the University of Virginia who was not involved with the new research. And previous studies had shown that bees like to visit artificial flowers that produce caffeine, Arnold notes—but how the caffeine itself might impact bees’ actions was unclear. Other research shows that tethered honeybees exposed to a target scent while eating caffeine stick out their tongues in response for longer periods of time, but those bees were unable to freely choose which flowers to visit.
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