Did you know there are bees out there that couldn’t care less about pollen or nectar? Yes, you read that right! Male orchid bees have a completely different mission: roaming the tropical forests looking for scents. Why? To create their own “designer perfumes,” which they will later show off to impress female bees during unique courtship rituals.
But these perfumes aren’t just for show. Each bee’s scent gives a clue about its ability to find rare and unique smells, giving female bees a hint about the male’s skills. But flowers alone don’t do the job as they’re often hard to find, short-lived, and don’t have enough variety to create truly complex fragrances. To expand their repertoire, orchid bees search for smells in unexpected places, like rotting wood, fruits, and even tree wounds. While earlier studies showed that flowers and other smells are essential for these bees, no one had thoroughly studied all the non-floral sources they rely on.
So, how do these bees build their unique perfumes? To find out, Jonas Henske and his team conducted a study across different rainforests in Costa Rica, Suriname, French Guiana, and Ecuador. They observed male bees in action, watching where they stopped to collect scents from things like tree bark, decaying wood, and tree sap.
The study revealed that orchid bees, especially male bees of Eufriesea corusca, were highly attracted to specific non-floral scent sources. They found 28 non-floral sources that attracted the bees—20 of which attracted males and 7 attracted females—showing that orchid bees use a wide range of materials to create their perfumes.
One of the most interesting sources was the Protium tree, which attracted more than 50% of the bees with its strong-smelling sap. Over two years, researchers tracked 45 bees, noting that some returned to the same tree multiple times, with one bee returning 19 days after its first visit. Chemical tests revealed that more than half of the compounds in the bees’ perfumes were found in Protium resin, showing a strong connection between the tree’s scent and the bees’ perfume-making habits.
Interestingly, the bees didn’t just stick to one source. Some scents, like methyl cinnamate, appeared in the bees’ perfumes but weren’t found in the Protium resin, suggesting that the bees blend smells from different sources to create unique, species-specific perfumes.
These findings show how adaptable orchid bees are when creating their perfumes, proving that male bees can mix scents from different sources depending on what’s available in their environment. Using floral and non-floral sources, these bees can still gather enough appealing scents to attract mates, even when flowers are rare.
READ THE ARTICLE:
Henske, J., De Dijn, B. P., & Eltz, T. (2024). Non‐floral scent sources of orchid bees: Observations and significance. Biotropica, e13395. https://doi.org/10.1111/btp.13395
Victor H. D. Silva
Victor H. D. Silva is a biologist passionate about the processes that shape interactions between plants and pollinators. He is currently focused on understanding how plant-pollinator interactions are influenced by urbanisation and how to make urban green areas more pollinator-friendly. For more information, follow him on ResearchGate as Victor H. D. Silva.
Portuguese translation by Victor H. D. Silva.
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