CO Addiction

WONG: An interesting study to tell you about. An Australian scientist is doping up honeybees with cocaine to study how their brain reacts to the drug, and possibly find a way to stop addiction in humans. STORY: The research found similarities between honeybees and humans both are driven by rewards and both have their judgment altered by cocaine. Report co-author Andrew Barron says its the first time it’s been shown that cocaine has been rewarding to an insect. Barren applied tiny doses of cocaine to the backs of bees before sending them out to hunt for food. Normally when bees return from collecting pollen they perform a dance to communicate where the food was found and how good it tasted. The cocaine-induced honeybees “waggle danced” much more enthusiastically than other bees. They also seemed to experience the same addictive pleasures as humans. [Andrew Barron, Report Co-author]: “What we saw as I was video recording the dances was that when bees were treated with cocaine, when they came back from their foraging trip they were far more likely to dance, and they danced far more vigorously so it was really as if cocaine changed their estimation of how successful they had been in their foraging trip.” Barron hopes to identify the neural pathways that cocaine targets in bees to find out more about the mechanisms involved in human addiction. He also wants to find out whether the drug has as devastating an effect on bee society as it does on humans. [Andrew Barron, Report Co …

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