[Pollinator] Bees take longer to learn floral odors polluted by vehicle fumes

[David Inouye]

*ORLANDO, Fla.* — Here’s another reason not to love car exhaust: The 
fumes may make it harder for honeybees 
<http://esa.confex.com/esa/ice2016/meetingapp.cgi/Paper/111796> to learn 
floral scents.

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.

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.

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).

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

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