The early bee catches the best flower and is smarter for it, new research says.
The study, led by Professor Giovanni Galizia from the University of Konstanz in Germany, found that bees are best at learning new odours in the morning.
That has allowed them to adapt to which flower is the best source of nectar, Galizia told CTV News Channel Sunday morning.
"One thing that we know about bees is that they are very good learners. They collect nectar from flowers and in order to be efficient they learn which flower has the best nectar. And what we know about bees is that they also learn not only which flower is the best flower, but also at what time of day would which flower have what nectar," he said.
Flowers accumulate most of their nectar in the morning, so it is advantageous to bees to learn new odours during that period.
"What we think is that the bees have adapted to the flowers, and probably the flowers have adapted to the bees in the sense that the flower that would give nectar earlier in the morning would capture the first bees and the bees that would learn better in the morning would capture the best nectar," Galizia said. "And so the two together have evolved to go early into the morning time."
This "co-evolving" is described in the study, which was published in the journal Behavioural Ecology and Sociobiology.
"It might be evolutionarily advantageous to be the 'early bee' and to 'catch' the flower in order to out-compete possible competitors such as butterflies, flies and (bees from) other hives," the researchers wrote.
In the study, 1,000 bees were tested by training them to identify different odours at different times of day.
The study found bees were much better at identifying what each odour meant in the morning.
Learning is very energy-intensive for bees' brains, so researchers suggest being "less clever" later in the day helps them conserve energy.
