This is scientific American's 60 second science. I'm Christopher in Tagyatta.

We humans enjoy coffee and tea to give our brains a caffeine boost,

and bees sometimes sip nectar that naturally contains caffeine, which seems to enhance

their memory.

Now a study suggests that bees enjoy another familiar drug produced by plants, nicotine.

As it turns out not just in humans, but even the bees seem to have difficulties quitting.

Lars Chitka, a professor of behavioral and sensory ecology at Queen Mary University of London.

Chika and his colleagues studied bumble bees as they visited fake flowers that

contain varying levels of nicotine.

Unnaturally high nicotine concentrations deterred the bees.

But at real world levels, the drug attracted bees.

And they even learned a flower's color faster,

if that flower offered a nicotine fix.

And sometimes bees paid a steep price for this preference.

They returned actually to flowers

that had previously sold the nicotine,

so to speak, even if these flowers no longer contain nectar.

Which might give nicotine pushing plants like tobacco, an edge.

It provides these plant species with an unfair advantage over competing plants because they can retain faithful

services of pollinators even if they're offering suboptimal nectar in this case.

The results are in the journal Scientific Reports.

And if caffeine and nicotine have these effects on bees,

...