Abstract

Hard-working bees play a crucial role in our ecosystem, helping plants reproduce. They are also vital for us – they help produce a lot of our food! Bees have a special menu of their own: they eat pollen and drink nectar from flowers. We wanted to know if honey bees can evaluate the quality of the pollen to see if it has the right mixture of different proteins and fats. We tested three types of pollen to see if they help bees grow. We then gave the bees a choice between the three types of natural pollen and between modified pollen. This allowed us to analyze the bees’ preferences and to conclude that honey bees either can’t or don’t evaluate the nutritional values of pollen.