Bees have a clever trick for helping their friends find lunch.

The insects use 'smelly footprints' to make their mark on flowers that they visit.

Other bumblebees then use this smell to decide which flowers to pollinate next.

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Scientists from the University of Bristol have discovered that bumblebees have the ability to use their 'smelly footprints' to distinguish between their own scent, the scent of a relative and the scent of a stranger (stock image)

The discovery was made by scientists from the University of Bristol who claim these 'smelly footprints' help bees distinguish between their own scent, the scent of a relative and the scent of a stranger.

And by using this ability, bees can improve their success at finding good sources of food and avoid flowers that have already been visited and mined of nutrients.

Richard Pearce from Bristol's School of Biological Sciences led the study alongside colleagues Dr Sean Rands and Dr Luca Giuggioli.

He said: 'Bumblebees secrete a substance whenever they touch their feet to a surface, much like us leaving fingerprints on whatever we touch.

'Marks of this invisible substance can be detected by themselves and other bumblebees, and are referred to as scent-marks.

Mr Pearce explains that, in the wild, other bumblebees will have visited nearby flowers within varying timeframes.

'This can affect the amount of nectar in the flowers,' he told MailOnline.

But because bees are able to read the scent left by the other bees' footprints, they can read which flowers have been visited the least, and which flowers weren't visited recently.

'Additionally, other bees take less or more of the nectar than the bee searching for nectar would,' Mr Pearce told MailOnline.

By using this ability, bees can improve their success at finding good sources of food and avoid flowers that have already been visited and mined of nutrients. This is because they can recognise who has visited flowers previously (stock image)

'So being able to distinguish between the different types of scent-marks might help a bumblebee to select flowers with more nectar inside.'

The Bristol team performed three separate experiments with bumblebees in which they were repeatedly exposed to rewarding and unrewarding flowers simultaneously that had footprints from different bees attached to them.

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Each flower type either carried scent-marks from bumblebees of differing relatedness or were unmarked.

The marks were either the bee's own marks, sisters from their nest, or strangers from another nest.

They discovered that bees were able to distinguish between these four different flower types, showing that not only can bees tell the marks of their own nest mates from strangers.

The results also show that they can discriminate between the smell of their own footprints and those of their nest mate sisters.

Richard Pearce added: 'This is the first time it has been shown that bumblebees can tell the difference between their scent and the scent of their family members.

'This ability could help them to remember which flowers they have visited recently.

'Bumblebees are flexible learners and, as we have discovered, can detect whether or not it is they or a different bumblebee that has visited a flower recently.

'These impressive abilities allows them to be cleverer in their search for food, which will help them to be more successful.'

Earlier this month a study showed that bees can teach themselves to play football.

The bees learned football for a sugar reward, released from a yellow ball every time they successfully pushed it to the middle of a ‘pitch’.

But the study showed for the first time that bees can learn by watching and, rather than copy what they have seen, change it to make it better.

A study by Queen Mary University of London found the insects, given a selection of balls, cleverly went for the closest even after watching demonstrator bees which always chose the furthest away.