Plants Provide Caffeine to Bees
There is no way to surprise if I visit a restaurant frequently because of their coffee, although other foods really suck. And it would be obvious to recommend my friends and family this place for hanging out. It's a quite nice to listen and completely makes sense.
In contrast, the homologous story seems weird for bee. Bees move from flowers to flowers to collect sugar and through "waggle dance" attracts their community mambers to a particularly good nutrient containging flowers. In exchange, plants have the opportunity to take their random visit to flowers for pollination. It's natural win-win combination. Unfortunately, poor sugar content flowers fail to attract bees. As like my favorite restaurant, they do the trick with coffee, where as sugar content sucks. Few plants produce caffeine and lure bees. Eventually, these bees collect less foods, still they love to visit those particular caffeine producing flowers happily.
The above story sounds fun and probably my writing style has made it funnier. No matter what you think about the story, the scientific merit behind the whole scenario is incredible. If the caffeine mediated idea is true and has universal implication, then caffeine producing plants has more scopes to create diversity in their next generation.
You may find the original research article by clicking the link below and don't forget to have a cup of coffee while reading this post.
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© Science Magazine
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