These Bees Make Their Own Perfume!

“He’s exactly the worth of the odor he’s carrying in his leg.”

Well, at least that’s what Dave Roubik, the scientist featured in the video we’re sharing, says about the male orchid bee. Certainly, there are a lot of factors to take into consideration when choosing a mate, but this is one that definitely took us by surprise!

Male orchid bees are stingerless collectors of smells. While their female counterparts are busy off building nests and collecting food, every male of the 250 species zips around from place to place to collect their specific cocktail of scents. These collections of compounds are their only hope to attract the attention of a female orchid bee, and show that they’re the one they should procreate with! ¹

And where do these bees store all of these scents? Oh, in their leg pouches, of course.

So let’s take a look at how these little perfumers go about it with this video from the Smithsonian featuring entomologist, Dave Roubik!

Via: Smithsonian Channel ²

The funny thing about orchid bees is…

… Even though their name may suggest that they’re dependant on orchids for survival, this doesn’t appear to be true. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.

In a 2011 article from UC Berkeley on a recently concluded study, they wrote that “to their surprise, the scientists found that the bees evolved at least 12 million years earlier than their orchid counterparts. Additionally, they found that the compounds produced by the orchids only accounted for 10 percent of the compounds collected by their pollinators. The remaining 90 percent could be coming from other sources, including tree resins.” ³