Australian scientists have decided that they dont’ have enough real illness to work on apparently and are now researching the effect that cocaine has on bees.
Researchers at Macquarie University applied cocaine solution to the backs of the insects and monitored their dance communication system, which is used to let other bees where to find food and how good it tastes.
They found that the bees used in the experiment responded more energetically….
“What we’re doing essentially is using cocaine as a tool to better understand how these tiny but quite complex brains function,” said Dr Andrew Barron of Macquarie University.
“What we found was that the honey bee responds to cocaine in very similar ways as humans, so cocaine changes the way the bees evaluate.”
Barron also noted that the insects began to show withdrawal symptoms when they were taken off the drug.
“We tested the bees’ ability to learn and distinguish between two different scents,” he said. “There was no impact on learning performance as long as the drug treatments were maintained, but if treatment ceased the bees had difficulty learning the task – similar to humans going into withdrawal.”
So… correct us if we’re wrong here, but isn’t a whole hive full of irritated bees going through withdrawal, something we DON”T want?
