A new study has added to a body of evidence suggesting that bees not only enjoy consuming certain pesticides, they experience something comparable to addiction when they do.
British researchers gave bumblebees in ten colonies a choice of two different food sources – one that was just straight sugar solution and one containing neonicotinoid pesticides – over the course of ten days.
“Given a choice, naive bees appear to avoid neonicotinoid-treated food. However, as individual bees increasingly experience the treated food they develop a preference for it,” said Dr Richard Gill, who led the study at Imperial College London.
“Our findings that bumblebees acquire a taste for neonicotinoids ticks certain symptoms of addictive behaviour, which is intriguing given the addictive properties of nicotine on humans, although more research is needed to determine this in bees.”
The Independent reports how over time, the bees visited the pesticide-laced food more and the other food less, and had no trouble finding the one they wanted even when the sources were moved around.