Slashdot Mirror
Some Bees Are Addicted to Caffeine (albanydailystar.com)
mdsolar shares a new article about plants which produce caffeine to attract bees and encourage repeat visits to help with their pollination. "Scientists at the University of Sussex said they thought the plants produce the caffeine in their nectar to fool bees into thinking it contains more sugar than it actually does," reports the Albany Daily Star. In addition, bees communicate by "dancing" for their colleagues, and the caffeinated bees danced faster, inadvertently directing the other bees to revisit those flowers, even after nectar had run dry. "If they just had one, three-hour exposure to the caffeinated nectar on the first day," one researcher said, "they would come back for many more days, and more often within each day."
They literally repost months-old stories as if they're brand new. This one was posted on CNET in October.
Makes sense. Plants didn't evolve to produce caffeine without there being a selection pressure towards it. This is presumably how that pressure originated, before humans got involved.
Racist joke gets a +3 funny? That's fucked up..