fairfolio
Saved Projects

Stop and Smell the Roses: How Choosy Are Insects about Scent?

CSEF · 2016 Zoology

Kaitlin A. Dean · Quail Lake Environmental Charter School, Clovis, Fresno County

Overview

Objectives/Goals The objective of my project is to determine what scent insects are most attracted to. Methods/Materials I chose to test five different scents: blood orange, exotic spices, vintage rose, fresh berries, and rosemary mint by trapping insects in bowls of scented water. I placed six yellow bowls (one for each scent plus a control bowl) randomly in five locations. I chose yellow bowls because I determined in last years science fair project that insects are most attracted to the color yellow. I used clear, harder plastic bowls inside of the yellow bowls because the scented oils were found to burn holes through the thin yellow bowls alone. The bowls were filled with water, a few drops of plain, non-scented dish soap and one teaspoon of the scented oil. After two days, I counted and sorted the insects trapped in each bowl. Finally, I ran this experiment twice so that I had ten trials in total for each scent. Results The results indicated that the exotic spices scent attracts slightly more insects than the other five scents and the control group that was tested. One unexpected result of the experiment was the attraction of bees. Two scents, exotic spices and fresh berries, trapped 82.5% of all of the bees. These were the scents that trapped the greatest and least number of insects and had the largest differences from the control group. This is an indication that scent does affect some insects. Conclusions/Discussion It is difficult to conclude that spicy scents always attract the most insects because it did not attract significantly more insects than the other scents. Bees, however, were significantly more attracted to two scents: exotic spice and fresh berries. Although I was unable to clearly attain my objective when looking at insects as a whole, the results of the bees provided a result that may be helpful if trying to attract pollinating insects to a home garden.

Summary statement

Using prior knowledge of color preference, I showed that scent can affect the attraction of certain insects.

Help received

I created and executed the project on my own.

Competition history

  • CSEF 2016 Zoology · Entry J2205

Resources

Related projects

Closest projects by meaning, across every fair and year in the corpus.

Browse more like this

Source: California Science & Engineering Fair public projects

Save projects to your library

Sign in with Google to keep track of projects you find interesting, organized into folders. An account also raises your daily allowance for “Has this been done?”, and lets you create a key for the MCP server with a much higher limit than anonymous use. Browsing stays public.

Continue with Google