That is Tracey Newman, a neurobiologist at Britain’s University of Southampton. She served as lead investigator of the new study.
She says the honeybee uses smell to find, identify and recognize the flowers they like. She says her team wanted to learn how pollutants might affect that process. Their study asks this question:
“If you have flowers and flower volatiles – flower perfumes – coming off an environment that is polluted, is the bee compromised in any way in its ability or its effectiveness to find the flowers that it’s looking for? And in particular, what we wanted to know is not the direct impact on the bee itself, but on the flower chemistry that the bee is having to find.”
Bees find these flowers by memorizing scents in the environment. The researchers used honeybees in controlled laboratory experiments. The bees were taught to link the smell of rapeseed flowers with nectar. Then, Ms. Newman says, the researchers added diesel exhaust to the mix. They wanted to see how well the bees could identify the smell in the polluted air.
“And (we) saw marked changes in the responses of the bees to that new, newly altered scent. The response rate in the bees went down to only a quarter of the original learned response.”
The scientist says nitric oxides in diesel fuel waste reacted with chemicals from the flower and changed or destroyed them. That process puts already troubled beehives even more at risk. Ms. Newman says the influence of diesel exhaust had never before been noted in connection with honeybee health, until now.
最新
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25