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COUNTRY LIFE IN BC • AUGUST 2018 Smart flowers have the tools to attract clever bees
Bees have an amazing ability to learn their flowers
by MARGARET EVANS There’s no doubt flowers
are beautiful and aromatic. But, more important, they are pretty pragmatic. Their sweet aroma is all about survival and, to help, they’ve got a little toolbox of tricks. And the one little animal at the top of its game that knows precisely what the flower has, what the scent means, and the value of co-op living is the bumblebee. To attract bees, flowers pull
several sensory cues out of their toolboxes. They can use scent, colour, texture, electrostatic signals, temperature, patterns and lines. And they even have different scent patterns across their surfaces. A bee might find the centre of the flower smells different from the petals’ edges. Now, new research from
the University of Bristol in the UK has shown that bumblebees can tell flowers apart just by how the invisible scent pattern is arranged on the surface. And when that invisible pattern is made visible in the experimental process, they instantly recognize the image visually that previously was just volatile compounds in the air. “Plants need many of the things that animals do,” says Dave Lawson, of University of Bristol’s School of Biological
Sciences. “They need space, nutrients, water. What differs is that plants don’t move around. [So], plants have evolved a lot of tricks and strategies that ensure their survival.” He says that specific patterns allow bees to differentiate between these scent patterns and remain loyal to flowers with those specific patterns. This will benefit flowers, since loyal bees will bring them the appropriate pollen and limit the amount of pollen from species they don’t want. While the origins of these special fragrance patterns are unknown, another study suggests that they help bees locate the flowers’ nectary faster, possibly making foraging more efficient. The research came about
from previous studies analyzing contrasting scent arrangements on flowers. “Seeing that flowers had these spatial fragrance patterns led to us asking, what are these for?” says Lawson. “What are the benefits to the plant and what are the benefits to the pollinator? We started designing experiments using the bumblebees we had in the lab.” They designed artificial
flowers from circular plastic disks with an arrangement of wells that could hold tiny
A captive bumblebee walks across an artificial plastic flower. Using its feelers, it is working out the pattern of scent that has been made with peppermint oil in the tiny wells. DR. DAVE LAWSON, UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL UK PHOTO
drops of essential oils. They made two groups of flowers with patterns arranged in a circle or a cross and the bees figured out the patterns by using their feelers. To train the bees to associate one of the scent patterns with a reward, they had a reward in one group of plastic flowers and no reward in another group. “Bees are amazing learners,”
he says. “When a bumblebee emerges from the hive, it’s faced with a complex floral marketplace and must learn which flowers are easy to handle and which supply appropriate rewards. Many species of bees also
preferentially forage from a particular species of flowers once they’ve learnt that they are a good source of nectar or pollen. Over time, some flowers will stop flowering and these bees will need to learn to forage from other flowers. Because of this constant shifting in the floral marketplace, bees have evolved an amazing capacity for learning and memorizing floral displays which is all the more incredible when you consider that a bee’s brain is smaller than a grain of rice.” One question the
researchers explored was to see if learning a particular
scent pattern influenced the bees’ foraging choices when faced with a different sensory channel such as a visual one. “We found that when bees
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were trained with a rewarding scent pattern in a cross arrangement, they preferentially visited artificial flowers with visual cross patterns. This was an extremely exciting find but, as yet, we don’t know why the bees would carry this preference over to signals from another sensory channel. It could be a neurological quirk of the bees who process scent signals and visual signals within the same area of their brain, or it could benefit the bees when one signal is less reliable than another, i.e., in varying light conditions.” Lawson says that there is so much more to be discovered about scent patterns on flowers. It appears that individual flowers in the same species have the same scent pattern. But do they change over time or change at different life cycle stages? “Previous studies suggest that the overall scent profile of a flower can change, so it’s possible that the scent’s spatial arrangement may also change,” he says. “We’re looking into whether there are any other display components that seem to overlap in a similar way to scent and visual patterns. [One student] is looking into temperature patterns.” The research was published
in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.
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