科学美国人60秒:Bees Rank Pollen by Taste

Walk through Times Square—you're bombarded with advertising. And it turns out, a bumblebee might have a similar feeling, buzzing through a field of flowers. "So these flowers are these billboards, they're advertising a good, this delicious nectar reward, and bees are very picky shoppers." Anne Leonard, a pollination biologist at the University of Nevada, Reno.
走过纽约时报广场——广告不断地烦扰着你的生活。并且事实证明，熊蜂在嗡嗡地飞过花的海洋时，可能会有类似的感觉。“因此，这些花朵就像那些广告牌一样，它们在为这些美味的花蜜打广告，蜜蜂就是那些非常挑剔的消费者。雷诺内华达大学授粉生物学家，安妮·伦纳德说道。

She describes a flower field as a sort of pollination marketplace. And one way bees choose where to visit? "Bees are nectar experts. They are really good at assessing even really small differences in the sugar concentration of nectar." They also scope out flower shape and size, color and scent. And now Leonard and her colleagues have discovered that bumblebees are pollen aficionados, too.
她把花的海洋描述为一个授粉市场，蜜蜂选择去哪里采集花蜜的方法是什么？“蜜蜂是花蜜的专家。它们很擅长对花蜜进行评估，即使是花蜜糖的浓度存在微小的区别。”它们还能确定花的形状、大小、颜色和气味。现在伦纳德和她的研究团队发现熊蜂也是花粉爱好者。

They found that out by lacing batches of cherry pollen with either table sugar or bitter quinine. And to display the pollen to bees, "We got really into it—we started 3-D printing flowers in our lab." And for the anther—the male flower part, which presents the pollen—pipe cleaners. "So we bought out Michael's craft store supplies of these pipe cleaners and used them in our experiments."
他们通过给不同批次分别含有甜蔗糖、苦奎宁的樱桃花粉系上标签，并向蜜蜂展示来进行研究。“我们真的深入到这项研究中——我们开始在实验室3-D打印这些花朵。对于呈现出花粉的花药——花的雄性部分，我们使用清管器。因此我们买下了迈克尔工艺品店的清管器并在我们的实验中使用它们。

Turns out bees would return again and again to the same color flower that dispensed sweet pollen, and spend more time collecting there. But when confronted with the bitter pollen? They sought a different colored flower for their very next stop. All of which suggests that, in addition to savoring nectar, bees taste pollen too—and judge flowers by it. The results are in the journal Biology Letters. [Felicity Muth, Jacob S. Francis and Anne S. Leonard, Bees use the taste of pollen to determine which flowers to visit]
实验证明，蜜蜂会在相同颜色含有甜蔗糖花粉的花朵间重复往返，并且花费更多的时间来采集。但当遇到含有苦奎宁的花粉时呢？它们在下一次停留时将会寻找一种与之不同颜色的花朵。所有这一切表明，除了品味花蜜，蜜蜂也会品尝花粉的味道——并且通过花粉来判断花朵。该研究结果刊登在《生物学快报》（Biology Letters）杂志上。

The finding means that plants have to find a happy medium: "So can you make your pollen attractive enough that the bees will collect it, but distasteful enough that they won't collect too much of it?" And that balancing act, of carefully calibrated chemistry—it's just one of the many transactions that plays out in the buzzing pollination marketplace. Where the object is to make a sweet profit.
该发现意味着植物必须找到一个折中的办法：“所以你只有让你的花粉有足够的吸引力，蜜蜂才会进行采集，但不合口味的花粉，它们不会采集太多?”并且这一精确校准化学的自然运作——只是在嗡嗡地授粉市场中所表现出的众多交易中的一种。在该市场中，蜜蜂们旨在获得甜蜜的“利润”。

—Christopher Intagliata
克里斯托弗·因塔格里塔报道。