Learning of a Mimic Odor within Beehives Improves Pollination Service Efficiency in a Commercial Crop

ARENAS, ANDRÉS; ESTRAVIS BARCALA, C; FARINA WALTER M.; SUSIC MARTIN CINTHIA; DIAZ, PC

CURRENT BIOLOGY

CELL PRESS

Lugar: United States; Año: 2020 vol. 30 p. 1 - 7

0960-9822

Thegrowingglobaldemandforpollination services leadsproducers toconsider newstrategies in pollinatormanagementto improve its efficiency in agroecosystems [1?3]. Central place foragers, like honeybees, learn floralcues not only in the field but also inside the nest,where resource cues introduced into the hive improve foragingby guiding bees toward the learned stimuli [4]. In this regard, attempts to condition beeswith crop-odor-scentedfoodproducedambiguous resultsand lacked yieldmeasurements [5?7]. To deepen ourunderstandingof theuseof odors as part of a precision pollination strategy, we developed a simple synthetic odorant mixture that beesgeneralized with the natural floral scent of sunflower for hybrid seed production, an economically important andhighly pollinator-dependent crop [8]. Encompassing different experimental approaches, our results show thatfeeding colonies food scentedwith the sunflowermimic (SM) odor enabled the establishment of olfactorymemoriesthat biased bees to the sunflower crop. The offering of a rewarded odor mimicking the sunflower floralfragrance promoted higher foraging activity, increased the proportion of dances advertising the target inflorescencesand reduced delays in dance onset, positively affected the density of bees on the crop, and increasedyields from 29% to 57% in different sunflower hybrids. This study highlights the role of olfactory learning withinthe social context of the hive to bias foraging preferences in a novel agricultural environment and suggest thatimprovements in the tested parameters were due to bees anticipated response to the sunflower scent.