Bees can taste the pollen they collect, and favour the sweet kind.

Felicity Muth and her colleagues at the University of Nevada in Reno offered bumblebees (Bombus impatiens) an artificial flower containing one of three types of pollen — sweet, bitter or

unflavoured. Bees presented with the sweet flower spent longer collecting pollen than did those offered the other types. When the bees were presented with two more flowers, one of which was

the same colour as the first, few bees opted to change colour if their first flower had been sweet or unflavoured.