Computer-predicted scents keep foraging honey bees away from treated crops
Kowalewski J, Baer-Imhoof BF, Guda T, Luy M, DePalma P
Pollinators
Honey bees visiting your flowering vegetables, orchard trees, and herb beds could someday be steered away from freshly sprayed plants by a harmless scent, cutting one of the main ways pesticides reach pollinators.
Scientists taught a computer which smells honey bees dislike, using earlier bee behavior data. The computer searched over 50 million chemicals and picked more than 130 likely repellents, and the best seven pushed away bees foraging outdoors. The idea is to add such a scent to sprayed crops so bees stay clear until the pesticide is safe.
Key Findings
A machine-learning model predicting bee aversion from chemical structure screened more than 50 million compounds and flagged over 130 repellent candidates.
Laboratory tests with honey bees showed high predictive success, and data from honey bees and Drosophila fruit flies was used to refine the model.
The top seven candidates strongly repelled freely foraging honey bees in a field assay.
chevron_right Technical Summary
Researchers trained a computer model to predict which smells honey bees avoid, then screened over 50 million compounds and found more than 130 candidates. The top seven repelled free-flying bees in field tests, which could help keep bees off pesticide-treated crops.
Abstract Preview
Original paper
Machine learning of honey bee olfactory behavior identifies repellent odorants in free-flying bees in the field.
Preventing beneficial insects like honey bees (Apis mellifera) from contacting pesticides on crops using odorants could counter current pollinator declines. However, the discovery of behaviorally a...
open_in_new Read full abstractAbstract copyright held by the original publisher.
Was this useful?
Want to tell us more? (optional)
Thanks for the note!
Something went wrong — please try again.
Too many submissions. Try again in an hour.
Rapid disruption of pollination function by the invasive plant Impatiens glan...
That pretty pink-flowered plant spreading along your local riverbank or woodland edge could be quietly starving native wildflowers of the bee visits they nee...
Machine learning is an artificial intelligence field that develops statistical algorithms capable of learning patterns from data to perform predictions and analyses without explicit programming. In plant science, these algorithms accelerate the analysis of complex biological datasets—from genomic
arrow_forward Explore topic