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In this activity, learners smell bottles containing bee pheromone molecules (or herb/spice extracts as a substitute). Bees release these molecules to send messages to each other. The pheromones smell like bananas, lemon, blue cheese, fruit or nothing to us. But to a bee they mean something quite different. Learners can match the molecule pictures on the smell bottles with the pictures in the accompanying booklet, to discover what each smell means to a bee. [Activity is publicly available through a web crawler capture on Archive.org.]
- 10 to 30 minutes
- 30 to 45 minutes
- $5 - $10 per group of students
- Ages 11 - 18
- Activity, Experiment/Lab Activity
- English
Quick Guide
Materials List (per group of students)
- 4 squeeze Bottles
- one drop of undiluted citral (can also use lemon essence)
- one drop of undiluted 2-heptanone (heptan-2-one)
- one drop of undiluted isoamyl acetate (isopentyl acetate) (can also use banana essence)
- one empty bottle
- herb/spice extracts (as substitute)
Subjects
-
Life Sciences
-
Diversity of Life
- Animals
-
Human Senses and Perception
- Smell
-
Diversity of Life
-
Physical Sciences
-
Chemistry
- Chemical Reactions
- Chemistry of Life
-
Chemistry
Informal Categories
- Animals
Audience
To use this activity, learners need to:
- see
- smell
Learning styles supported:
- Uses STEM to solve real-world problems
- Involves hands-on or lab activities
Other
Access Rights:
- Free access
By:
Source Collection
- Pfizer Foundation Biochemistry Discovery Lab
Rights:
- All rights reserved, New York Hall of Science, 2001
Funding Sources:
- Pfizer Foundation
- National Science Foundation, 9814954
- The Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation, Inc.