According to a new study, diesel exhaust might be giving honeybees a stuffy nose.
Wolfgang Hägele/Wikimedia Commons
In a recent post, Conservation Magazine highlights a new study about how diesel exhaust might affect honeybees. The article equates the effect of the exhaust to a cold:
“Air pollution may be giving bees the equivalent of a stuffed-up nose … diesel exhaust distorts the scents of flowers — and as a result, honeybees could have trouble sniffing out plants to pollinate.”
The study, published this month in Science Reports, says honeybees are drawn to flowers by their smell:
“Honeybees have a sensitive sense of smell and an exceptional ability to learn and memorize new odours, enabling them to use floral odours to help locate, identify and recognise the flowers from which they forage.”
The study put bees to the test to try and sniff out the smell for a synthetic mix of several chemicals found in the natural scent of oilseed rape flowers. The synthetic odor was placed in glass bottles with clean air and bottles with diesel exhaust. The diesel pollution reduced the level of scent chemicals in the synthetic odor. Conservation Magazine writes:
“When the researchers removed one of the chemicals from the mix, the bees had a harder time recognizing the scent — even though that chemical had made up only 0.8 percent of the mixture.”
Concerns about the steep decline of honeybees from colony collapse disorder have been running high. Here in the Northwest, their cousin bumblebees have been in the news.
In June, pesticides were found to be the culprit for the death of thousands of bumblebees in a Wilsonville, Ore. parking lot.
Later in the summer, Xerces Society biologist Rich Hatfield found both promising and concerning news at Mount Hood. The good news: he found new populations of the western bumblebee, which was once very common but has disappeared in recent years. Potentially bad news: he didn't see one species he expected to see in the area, the Sitka bumblebee.
The concern about these striped insects is certainly justified. Xerces Society’s website notes that pollinators are “necessary for the reproduction of nearly 70 percent of the world’s flowering plants, including more than two-thirds of the world’s crop species.” What happens to bees will affect us humans directly.
-- Toni Tabora-Roberts
