By Susan Milius
Some bees rely on olfactory spying to capitalize on other bees’ hard work, researchers report.
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When certain bees find food, they mark the trail for their nest mates by leaving odiferous chemicals on leaves and other stopover points during the flight home. In an outdoor laboratory setup, James C. Nieh of the University of California, San Diego and his colleagues examined foraging behavior of an aggressive Brazilian bee, the stingless Trigona spinipes. Its foragers spy on another Brazilian stingless species, Melipona rufiventris, the researchers report in the August 7 Proceedings of the Royal Society of London.