![]() ![]() To answer this question, Arnold and the team (including researchers from NRI and also NIAB EMR, a horticultural research organization in the UK) decided to instead give the bees caffeine at their nest while they learned to associate a specific smell - a synthetic odor blend that mimics the scent of a strawberry flower - with a delicious sugar solution. With that setup, it's difficult to pinpoint the role caffeine plays: do caffeinated bees actually have better memories, or do they just crave the caffeine? But previous experiments where bees showed a preference for the smell of flowers with caffeinated nectar have mostly been designed to give bees caffeine at the flower itself. Scientists already know that caffeine, which is found naturally in plants like coffee and citrus, plays a role in converting bees into faithful customers of caffeinated flowers. "They need to rely on a lot of cues, such as their sense of smell, to find good flowers." "It's really quite a challenging environment out there for bumble bees because they don't have extraordinarily sharp vision at long range," Arnold says. "We wanted to see if providing caffeine would help their brains create a positive association between a certain flower odor and a sugar reward."Ĭhoosing the best flower for food isn't as easy as it seems for bees. "When you give bees caffeine, they don't do anything like fly in loops, but do seem to be more motivated and more efficient," says Sarah Arnold, a researcher at the Natural Resources Institute (NRI) of the University of Greenwich in the UK.
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