How do bees smell?
Short answerTrueEstablished evidence
With their antennae, which carry receptor neurons in the tens of thousands. Each odour produces a characteristic spatial pattern of activity across roughly a hundred and sixty glomeruli in the antennal lobe, and bees learn to recognise those patterns fast — often after a single pairing of a scent with sugar.
How an odour is encoded
Pore plates and hairs along the antenna carry the receptor neurons. Their signals converge on the antennal lobes, where each odour lights up a particular combination of glomeruli. A scent is, in effect, a shape drawn across that map, and learning a scent means learning to recognise the shape. Bees discriminate between molecules differing by a single carbon in a chain, and between mixtures differing only in the ratio of their components.
The comparison with dogs
What smell is used for
- Locating a patch of flowers at distance, where scent carries further than colour.
- Identifying which species a flower is once close.
- Reading the colony odour that guards use to decide who belongs.
- Detecting the pheromones that regulate almost everything a colony does.
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 honeybee as a model for understanding the basis of cognition — Nature Reviews Neuroscience (2012) · Peer-reviewed article
- The Mind of a Bee — Princeton University Press (2022) · Monograph
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