HONG KONG: Bees prefer flowers laced with caffeine, researchers find, and even try to lead their bee buddies to the wake-up juice with “waggle dances.” Could pumpkin spice pollen be far behind?
Some of us can’t start our day unless we’ve sucked down a steaming cup of joe or a couple of cans of soda to get that delicious, daily fix of caffeine. Heck, some of us are so addicted to the stuff we’d hook up to an IV latte drip to get it injected directly into our bloodstreams every morning if we could.
Humans may not be the only species on Earth that have to bear with the burden of a crippling caffeine addiction. Researchers from the University of Sussex in England and the University of Bern in Switzerland discovered that bees love the stuff — and that flowers may be using that addiction to their advantage.
They published their study Thursday in the journal Current Biology.
The study looked at the behavior patterns of three hives containing tagged honeybees. Researchers observed the bees as they collected nectar from one of two feeders. One contained an “unscented sucrose solution” and the other “caffeine at a concentration found naturally in nectar,” according to the study.
Researchers found that the bees did more foraging after they collected the nectar that contained caffeine and even tried to recruit their fellow foragers to the sources that contained caffeine with “waggle dances,” a movement pattern that bees use to communicate the distance and direction of food sources. The study says the bees were also less inclined to seek out other sources of nectar and even quadrupled their recruitment behavior once they got a taste of the magical wake-up juice.
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