In the aftermath of previous findings that proved caffeine improved bee memory, helping them quickly learn the scent linked to the caffeinated food, results have also emerged that show how plants are actually exploiting the bees by getting them addicted to caffeine. This addiction reduces their performance in making honey, and they are forced to come back to the same plant even though it offers relatively less nectar than the decaf sources.

“What I think it does is make them exploited pollinators,” Margaret Couvillon at the University of Sussex, UK says. “The plants are tricking them into foraging in ways that benefit the plant, not the bee.”

To test this further, Couvillon’s team fed the bees caffeinated solution with the right concentration of nectar in it. The bees had little tags stuck to their bags for easy identification. After three hour, they were back in the same spot, in need of the high. “These poor bees came back for four or five days afterwards, and they were kind of desperate,” Couvillon says. The bees continued to search for caffeine instead of the nectar required to make honey.

Caffeine was also warping other foraging behaviours; the honeybees who were in the caffeine buzz zone, returned to their hive and did the usual “waggle dance” they do to direct fellow workers back to a particularly sweet source, just much more enthusiastically. Couvillon’s team calculates that caffeine quadruples the number of waggle dances a bee will do. And each bee convinced by the dance will come back from the sugar source caffeinated, too, strengthening the effect.

The plants use this to their advantage as it is fairly easy to spike their nectar with caffeine for fast pollination and low energy expenditure.

“It really raises a lot of interesting questions about the role of caffeine in the food web,” says James Nieh of the University of California in San Diego. “Although it may seem that the poor bees are being tempted or drugged by these plants, bees have their own tricks that the plants need to defend against,” Nieh says. “Nature is not big on honesty unless it’s somehow enforced, It’s kind of an arms race.”

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Author:Technology Blog