Heat waves don’t just make bumblebees hot. The high temperatures also seem to drastically reduce their sense of smell — with possible negative effects on the survival of colonies.
For bumblebees, the ability to smell flowers is a matter of life or death. Olfactory, along with visual, cues lead them to the best flowers, which they in turn use as a food source (SN: 4/9/24). But exposure to simulated heat waves reduced the ability of bumblebee antennae to detect flower scents by up to 80 percent, insect ecologist Sabine Nooten and colleagues report in the August Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
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