Stat Of The Week: A Caffeinated Workforce

The productivity benefits appear to transcend phylum.

While an extensive report by the Guardian on the U.S. food industry has recently raised monopoly concerns, another new agriculture-related stat has largely flown under the radar. 

As noted by VICE, a study published this week in Current Biology reveals that lawyers aren’t the only ones who see an improved work focus after ingesting caffeine. 

Researchers in the study observed bees that were trained to link a strawberry scent with a sugary reward, with some bees given a dose of caffeine in the training and some not given caffeine. 

When the bees were released into a flying area with strawberry-scented flowers and other “distractor flowers,” the bees receiving a dose of caffeine came out ahead — 70% of the caffeinated bees visited the strawberry flowers first, compared with 60% of the non-caffeinated bees. 

Sarah Arnold of the University of Greenwich, who led the study, told VICE that the findings open up “questions about what aspects of bee behavior caffeine (which occurs naturally in some plants’ nectar) and other nectar natural products might influence, and under what circumstances, and how this might be applied more widely in crop pollination.”

A Caffeine Buzz Helps Bumble Bees Do Their Jobs Better, Study Finds [VICE]


Jeremy Barker is the director of content marketing for Breaking Media. Feel free to email him with questions or comments and to connect on LinkedIn