Smells like bees' spirit

13 August 2008

Bumblebees choose whether to search for food according to how stocked their nests are, say scientists from Queen Mary, University of London.

When bumblebees return to the nest from a successful foraging mission, they produce a pheromone which encourages their nest mates to also go out and find food. Scientists had originally thought that these pheromones elicited a standard response from all bees. But new research from Queen Mary's School of Biological and Chemical Sciences has shown that bees' response to the pheromone changes according to their situation.

Dr Mathieu Molet and Dr Nigel Raine have shown that worker bees are much more likely to respond to the pheromone and leave the nest in search of food, if the colony has little or no food reserves left.

"Flying around all day to find nectar and pollen from flowers is hard work. So it makes sense that bees are more likely to respond to the pheromone when honey reserves are low," said Dr Molet.

Writing in the journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, the team - funded by the Natural Environment Research Council - explain how they used radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology to automatically record the activity of bees in the lab. This is the same electronic tagging system used in a London Underground oyster card.

Different colonies of bumblebees (Bombus terrestris) were stocked with different levels of food reserves (honeypots). Artificial foraging pheromones were applied to the bees, and they were monitored over 16,000 'foraging bouts'. The response to the pheromones was stronger in colonies with less food - with more worker bees becoming active and more foraging bouts being performed.

The team's findings suggest that the pheromone can modulate a bumblebee's foraging activity - preventing needless energy expenditure and exposure to risk when food stores are already high. In future, such artificial pheromones could also be used to increase the effectiveness of bumblebee colonies pollinating commercial crops, such as tomatoes.

Further information

Siân Halkyard
Senior Communications Officer
Queen Mary, University of London
Tel: 020 7882 7454
Mob: 0797 009 6175

(A copy of the paper, high resolution images and video footages of the bees in action are all available on request)

Dr Mathieu Molet and Dr Nigel Raine are available for interview.

NERC Press Office
Natural Environment Research Council
Polaris House, North Star Avenue
Swindon, SN2 1EU
Tel: 01793 411561
Mob: 07917 557215

Notes

1. M Molet, L Chittka, RJ Stelzer, S Streit and NE Raine 'Colony nutritional status modulates worker responses to foraging recruitment pheromone in the bumblebee Bombus terrestris' was published in the journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology on 13 August 2008. doi:10.1007/s00265-008-0623-3.

2. The Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) funds world-class science, in universities and its own research centres, that increases knowledge and understanding of the natural world. It is tackling major environmental issues such as climate change, biodiversity and natural hazards. NERC receives around £400m a year from the government's science budget, which is used to provide independent research and training in the environmental sciences.

Smells like bees' spirit

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