This is scientific American 60 second science.

I'm Christopher Intagiyata.

Walk through Times Square, you're bombarded with advertising.

And it turns out, a bumblebee might have a similar feeling buzzing through a field of flowers.

So these flowers are these billboards, they're advertising a good, this delicious nectar award,

and bees are very picky shoppers.

And Leonard, a pollination biologist at the this nectar award and bees are very picky shoppers.

Ann Leonard, a pollination biologist at the University of Nevada Reno.

She describes a flower field as a sort of pollination marketplace and one way bees choose where to visit.

Bees are nectar experts.

They are really good at assessing even really small differences

in like the sugar concentration of nectar.

They also scope out the shape and size of flowers and their color and scent.

And now Leonard and her colleagues have discovered that Bumblebees are pollen aficionados too.

They found that out by lacing batches of

cherry pollen with either table sugar or bitter quinine. And to display the

pollen to bees, we got really into it. We started 3D printing flowers in our lab.

And for the anther, the male flower part which presents the pollen,

pipe cleaners.

So we've bought out Michael's craft store supplies of these pipe cleaners and we use them in our experiments.

Turns out bees would return again and again to the same color flower that dispense sweet pollen and spend more time collecting there.

But when confronted with the bitter pollen, they sought a different colored flower for their very next stop.

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