Male orchid bee creates own perfume

The male orchid bee has to create its own individual perfume to attract the female of the species, new scientific research has shown.

Professor Scott Armbruster, of the University of Portsmouth, has been studying the relationship between euglossine bees and flowers in South America and found that each bee has to blend its own perfume in order to find a mate.

He explained that the female euglossine bee, also known as the orchid bee, has the job of home-building by collecting resin from dalechampia flowers to help create nests for their offspring.

But because the flowers visited by these bees do not produce edible pollen or nectar, Prof Armbruster wanted to find out how they become pollinated.

And he discovered that the male bee has to visit a variety of flowers, decaying wood and sap in order to make its "personal" perfume and at the same time pollinate the flowers.

Prof Armbruster said: "The males collect scents from flowers, sap and decaying wood with their front legs and store them in their hind legs until they have accumulated a complex blend.

"It is thought this creation of a perfume helps the male attract a female and helps the female choose which male to accept. The scent acts a little like sex pheromones.

"If he wants to pass his genes on to the next generation he must buzz from flower, to sap, to decaying wood to create an individual scent to attract a mate. He has to be, if you like, the bee's knees at perfume-making."

Euglossine bees are tropical relatives of honeybees and bumblebees. They have brightly-coloured, often metallic, colourings, extremely long tongues and can fly far and fast, almost certainly because the species of plants they depend upon are spread over a wide area.

Prof Armbruster added: "I am interested in the roles of historical accidents and extinction in evolution. Some 99.9% of all organisms are already extinct. You could say that those that have survived are true winners."

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