“Once they arrive, they kiss one, then another, and another.
Mouth-to-mouth contact means that, in a couple of hours, many individuals participate and the collective distribution of the liquid is extremely fast.”
It is not an orgy with eschatological overtones.
They are bees - the kind that have a sting and produce honey - doing what they do best.
“Transmit information
,” defined Walter Farina, one of those biologists who insist for a couple of decades with a certain whim of basic science and manage to develop, in this case, synthetic fragrances to generate what is called
intelligent pollination
.
Then they patent the idea and set up a start-up.
None of this is so new;
They are projects that take sweat and time.
It is worth telling now, not only because of the touch of color of the bees' kisses, the perfume of the flowers and the crops that are bucolicly replicated by intelligent pollination but because Beeflow, the licensee of Tobee (the public start-up -private company that Farina promoted from the Social Insects Laboratory at IFIBYNE-UBA/Conicet), is processing, now outside of Argentina,
new fragrance patents
.
Smart pollination is a discovery that makes pollination more efficient.
What does "pollination" mean?
A very interesting topic, although for some it represents a soporific chapter of primary school.
It is that particular form of copulation of sexual plants, which requires the
transfer of pollen
from the male to the female specimen, in a sort of
threesome
.
A sexual threesome in which two of the members do not even touch each other and a third party acts as an intermediary.
It turns out that
a third of the world's agriculture
reproduces by pollination.
The communicating vessel, in 95% of cases, is fulfilled by bees.
Let's return, then, to intelligent pollination.
A bee looking for nectar to take to its hive.
Photo: Walter Farina
You have to recalculate a little to understand the achievement of Farina's bee perfumes, which with its laboratory has already developed (and seeks to patent abroad) fragrances of sunflower, pears, apples, almonds, blueberries and kiwi, while alfalfa, avocados, cherries and strawberries are in the research phase.
Their bees are honey bees, on the one hand, but also “highly social.”
He would have to imagine them like this: a fertile queen, on the one hand, and thousands of “individuals” (he says) from the worker caste, on the other.
There are
50,000 to 60,000 bees
that have a developed reproductive system but are dedicated to
defense, maintenance and collection
tasks .
This is the part that matters to us, Farina said.
And the kisses come.
Information viralized among bees
“When they discover a rich food source, social bees return to the colony, but instead of looking for a wax cell to collect the nectar they bring, they kiss another bee to transfer the nectar from their crop.
They pass it from one to another, which is technically called trophallaxis and is something that other species also do.”
Any relationship between our kisses and those of bees?
Farina agreed: “The kiss is nothing other than the
ritualization of trophallaxis
in humans.”
Leaving aside all passionate impulses, the interesting thing about bee kisses is that they leave a very lasting olfactory memory in those who receive them.
The kiss is literally information.
Transmits learning.
“It is like with (the
Russian physiologist Ivan ) Pavlov's famous dog, which establishes an association between the bell ringing and food,” Farina compared, but stressed that in this case, partly because it is a social association, “
memories
are consolidated.”
very strong and durable
.”
What follows is either the germ of information viralization or a clear example of how wonderful nature can be: “Let's imagine that a bee discovers sunflower nectar in a specific place.
"In a couple of hours, thousands of individuals in one of these societies of 60,000 individuals will have
olfactory memory
of the nectar in question."
Walter Farina, bee expert, is a Senior Researcher at Conicet and head of the Social Insects Laboratory at IFIBYNE-UBA/Conicet.
“But there is another complexity,” he added: “We study the different communication systems in these communities, among them, the so-called
dance of the bees
.
When one of them finds a place rich in food, she not only gives these kisses but then performs a dance on the honeycomb.
Farina, a bug lover, describes everything with a rhythm that reveals his inexhaustible patience.
As he defined it, “everything can be seen in different online videos.
It is a very stereotypical dance.”
But the incredible thing is not that "the dance works as a
spectacular propaganda system
, which manages to gather a bunch of 'unemployed' bees around that jumping one", but, in effect, "the bee transmits where the crop with food is, "For example, sunflower nectar. With dance, it informs others of the direction and distance. For this discovery (
Karl Ritter von
) Frisch won the Nobel Prize in 1973."
Bees: from dancing and kisses to intelligent pollination
“We have food that spreads by word of mouth and generates individual memories that last up to 10 days in the colony.
Furthermore, a bee that dances to communicate '
this is great and it is 750 meters to the northwest'
.
Because, on average, they can search for food
between 2 and 12 kilometers
from the hive,” summarized the researcher.
Bees and the work of scientists from the Social Insects Laboratory of IFIBYNE-UBA/Conicet.
Photo: Walter Farina
The question was how humans could take advantage of such potential, thinking about adding
yield to crops
.
The Conicet group spent more than ten years trying to investigate how to interfere with the transmission of such effective information from bees, in order to direct them towards the crops of interest.
The issue was not minor: due to the essential role that bees play in the reproduction of a third of world agriculture, a 2013 estimate reported that these bugs generate a global profit of more than
200 billion dollars per year
.
Essences and fragrances in the key of a bee
"Frisch had proposed taking the flowers of a crop, crushing them, mixing them with sugar syrup and throwing it into the hives so that, once the olfactory memory was formed, the bees would go to the place corresponding to the smell. But the crushing did not go well. It did not work out well. results,” Farina said.
To overcome this proposal, they resorted to other strategies, but the obstacle was always that many of the floral “notes” are extremely "volatile", that is, they evaporate
quickly
.
Imitating a fragrance that would not be altered seemed like a very complex task.
One third of global agriculture depends on pollination.
It is mostly done by bees.
Photo: Walter Farina
So they did a new test: instead of aiming to imitate the complexity of fragrances, they sought, on the contrary,
to synthesize or simplify them
.
Anyone who knows something about the
sommelier
world will understand it.
A perfume is made up of different “notes”;
chemically, diverse components.
Instead of trying to copy them all, they stayed with the most basic, the essential of each smell, “to see if the bees would confuse it with the original.”
The result was successful: the bees
recognized the
synthetic fragrances and the scientists managed to direct them to the crops of interest, something they tested against control groups.
The evidence showed an increase of
between 25% and 50%
(depending on the agricultural species) in the overall yield of crops, in those cases of "treated" bees, Farina said, referring to those that were "tricked" with synthetic fragrances.
Does any of this imply submission?
Farina, a nature lover by any measure, assured that no: “As it is a technology that acts on learning, it is functional as long as the memories last.
Then, like all animal memories, they are forgotten and replaced by others.”
Beehives next to a field of sunflowers.
Photo: Walter Farina
What's more, he said, “bees are used in pollination services, but they are less stressed because as their task is more efficient,
the effort ends up being less
.”
And they obtain resources for their own purposes, without dispersing into wild plantations next to the crops.
As everything was more efficient, it was also seen that the queen laid more eggs and had more offspring.”
Little by little they consolidated a public-private consortium licensed by the UBA and Conicet to the start-up Beeflow, which already has six patents for fragrances capable of
enhancing different crops
.
They are registered in Argentina, the United States and China, and have others in the pipeline in the European Union, Australia and more countries in the region.
“None of this would have been viable without clear support for basic science,” reflected Farina, and concluded: “15 years ago they could have told me '
what is this for?'
'However, knowing how an insect society works can allow us to generate good in society.'
P.S.