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<p><strong>ORLANDO, Fla.</strong> — Here’s another reason not to
love car exhaust: The fumes may make it <a
href="http://esa.confex.com/esa/ice2016/meetingapp.cgi/Paper/111796"
target="_blank">harder for honeybees</a> to learn floral
scents.</p>
<p>In lab tests, bees normally caught on quickly that a puff of
floral scent meant a researcher would soon offer them a taste of
sugar, Ryan James Leonard of the University of Sydney said
September 30 at the International Congress of Entomology. After
two sequences of puff-then-sugar, just a whiff of fragrance
typically made the bees stick out their tongues. But when that
floral scent was mixed with vehicle exhaust, it took the bees
several more run-throughs to respond to the puff signal.</p>
<p>Honeybees buzzing among roadside flowers must contend with
vehicle pollution as they learn various foraging cues. Another
lab reported in 2013 that diesel exhaust reacted with some of
the chemical components of canola flowers, rendering them more
difficult for bees to recognize.</p>
<p>Building on that concern, Leonard and colleagues found that it
was easy for bees to learn the scent of linalool, a widespread
ingredient in many flower fragrances, whether mixed with exhaust
fumes or not. But exhaust made it take longer than two trials
for bees to learn the scent ingredients myrcene (three trials),
dipentene (four) and the full, multicomponent fragrance of
geraniums (six).</p>
<p>Road ecologists have put a lot of effort into studying how
vehicles kill animals. But Leonard hopes for more interest now
in how chronic exposure to traffic affects living animals</p>
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