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This is Scientific American's 60-Second Science. I'm Shayla Farson.

Every honey bee colony has its own unique scent, like a fingerprint, and bees use that scent to

recognize their nests mates, basically saying, you smell like me, so I'm going to let you into

the colony. But here's the mystery. If you transfer a baby bee into a new hive, not only does

the colony accept it, but that bee will eventually smell like its adopted nests mates, even though

they're not genetically related. This kind of got us thinking, perhaps it's not actually the

genetics of the bee, it's actually the genetics of the microbes that live within the bee.

Cassandra Vernier is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Illinois. She knew gut microbes

could affect the scent and communication of other animals, like hyenas. So she and her co-authors

designed a series of experiments to test whether microbes also changed the scent compounds

coating the outside of honeybees, known as cuticular hydrocarbons. In one experiment, they fed

different gut microbes to newly hatched sister bees. The bees developed distinct microbiomes,

and they also produced different cuticular hydrocarbon scents. But on the other hand,

if they were treated with different inoculums, they recognized each other as not nests mates or

intruders, and they attacked each other, usually in the form of biting each other. In other words,

bees from the same colony did not recognize each other when they had different gut microbes.

...