Honeybees are being trained to ‘sniff out’ sunflowers in a bid to stimulate crop production.
Scientists at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina discovered that bees could be conditioned like sniffer dogs to pick up scents. The team now hopes that this will help make bees more efficient during the pollination process.
A honeybee colony was given food which had been layered with a synthetic odour mimicking the smell of sunflowers. These bees were then found to have visited sunflowers more frequently, leading to a notable increase in crop production.
The findings could be good news for other crops which rely on pollination too, as the method could work for plants like apples or almonds, say scientists.
“We show that it’s possible to condition honeybees to a rewarded odour inside the colony, and this experience modifies the bees’ odour-guided behaviours later,” says Walter Farina, who led the research.
“The most surprising and relevant result is that the foraging preferences for the target crop are so prolonged and intensive that it promoted significant increases in the crop yields.”
Source: https://www.euronews.com/
