Can bees taste?
Short answerMostly trueEmerging research
Yes, but poorly by insect standards. The honey bee genome carries roughly a tenth as many taste receptor genes as a fruit fly. Bees respond strongly to sugars, detect salt and water, and have limited bitter sensitivity — which means a syrup a bee will happily drink is not evidence that it is good for her.
A genome built to smell
When the honey bee genome was sequenced, the odorant receptor family turned out to be unusually large and the gustatory receptor family unusually small. That lopsidedness is the finding behind almost everything said about how little bees taste, and it fits an animal whose main job is to find flowers by scent and then drink whatever nectar they contain.
Where the taste receptors are
- The antennae carry contact chemoreceptors, so a bee tastes what she touches before she drinks it.
- The mouthparts, and the tarsi — the feet — also carry gustatory sensilla, so a bee standing on a nectary is already sampling it.
- Sucrose responsiveness, measured by touching an antenna with sugar solution, is a stable individual trait that predicts which job a bee takes on and how she forages.
The consequence of poor bitter detection
Sources
- The chemoreceptor superfamily in the honey bee, Apis mellifera: expansion of the odorant, but not gustatory, receptor family — Genome Research (2006) · Peer-reviewed article
- The Mind of a Bee — Princeton University Press (2022) · Monograph
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