Question: How do you know which chemicals in a flower attract bees?

Matthew Alkan answered on 13 Jun 2019:

Great question, there are a few ways, ones is to use behaviour, you place the bee in a wind tunnel and place a non smelling fake flower and a fake flower with one chemical on it and you see how many times over about 100 runs the bee flys to each flower and compare if the bee has a preference for the chemical smelling flower or not. This also shows if the chemical is an attractant or repellant

The way i do it is i connect the bee’s antenna up to some special recording equipment and i spray chemical over the antenna, if the bee can smell the chemical we see an electric current being made and record that. This doesn’t tell you if the chemical attracts bee’s but only tells you if the bee can smell the chemical.

Hope that helps