The Scent of Individual Foraging Bees

Honey bees (Apis mellifera) forage by using their sense of smell and returning to floral odours that they have previously learned to associate with high-quality food rewards. Foraging bees communicate with other bees in the hive about food sources by exchanging chemical and locational information. It is well established that bees transfer non-volatile information regarding taste and quality of nectar via trophallaxis and communicate location information via directional dances. But to our knowledge, volatiles carried by returning forager bees on their bodies has not been explored as another source of chemical information. We investigated the cuticular-adsorbed odours of bees when foraging on three different crops and compared their odours with the crops’ flower headspace. We found that cuticular extracts were in majority correlated with the flower headspace where bees were foraging, specific to the crop and field. Our results support the hypothesis that the scent of returning forager bees can be communicated to hivemates and is associated with information about current floral resources. Some of the floral volatiles that we identified in bee extracts had been previously found to be key compounds learned from the crop, thus supporting a mechanism for the selection of decisive compounds.