Cocaine Makes Bees Dance, Let You Know They Have A Loft Apartment In The Financial Distict

In order to study the science of addiction, scientists in Australia dropped liquified freebase cocaine onto the backs of bees. And, surprise! It made them exit cars without wearing underwear. Their judgment (bees possess this?) was altered and they became excited by things that did not normally do so, like OH MY GOD DID YOU EVER NOTICE HOW AWESOME MCDONALD’S FRIES ARE? NO, I’M FREAKING SERIOUS! TRY THEM! TRY THEM NOW.

Bees who developed an addiction and made to stop receiving the drug cold turkey, their ability to associate an odor with sugary syrup was compromised. Explains Andrew B. Barron, senior lecturer at Macquarie University in Australia and a co-leader of the cokey bee study:

“What we have in the bee is a wonderfully simple system to see how brains react to a drug of abuse. It may be that when we know that, we’ll be able to stop a brain reacting to a drug of abuse, and then we may be able to discover new ways to prevent abuse in humans.”

One fun discovery that occurred as a result of these studies is that the buzzed bees were “twice as likely to dance” to show other bees possible food sources over non-coked-up bees. Which, naturally, immediately reminded us of this:

Food Dance Gets New Life When Bees Get Cocaine [NY Times]