Honey bees smell like bananas

Research on honey bees at the University of Sussesx is primarily carried out in LASI, a lab specialising in honey bees and other social insects. I won’t pretend to know much at all about honey bees, their ecology is very different from the wild species I study, but one of the many behavioural elements they study is the pheromones they produce. Over lunch we were offered a bottle of the collected pheromone to smell – because naturally this is the sort of thing we would be doing at lunch – and it has the particularly strong smell of banana-flavoured sweets.

The source of the smell is isoamyl acetate (or banana oil), an organic compound found naturally in banana plants - as well as in the pheromones of honey bees. There’s a myth that the strange banana-like taste in milkshakes and sweets is based on an old variety of banana that was supposedly wiped out by a fungus. There’s little evidence for this. Isoamyl acetate is found in all varieties and is extracted for food flavouring. Presumably though, it was nobody’s intention to also make food taste like honey bee pheromones. But for future reference – that’s what they smell like!