It is widely known that honey bees collect and are thereby exposed to a variety of phytochemicals in their effort to supply the colony with its essential requirements of protein and carbohydrates. Berenbaum et al suggest that these incidental substances have a beneficial effect of the immune response. 

On the other hand, this paper suggests that bees and other pollinators actually avoid nectar that contains strong concentrations of phytochemicals, and merely tolerate them. In fact, their tolerance increases as the sugar concentration of the nectar increases, effectively taking the bad with the good, if it's good enough.


> honeybees prefer low concentrations of phenolics (Hagler and Buchmann 1993) and alkaloids (Singaravelan et al. 2005) to a pure sucrose solution.

> Johnson et al. (2006) found that honeybees and amethyst sunbirds Chalcomitra amethystina reject Aloe vryheidensis nectar containing phenolics

> in an experiment with bumblebees Bombus impatiens, the deterrent effect of gelsemine was reduced by increasing the sucrose concentration from 1 M to 1.8 M (Gegear et al. 2007). Similar results have been found for honeybees, where an increase in the sugar concentration of artificial nectar increases consumption of phenolics

> Activity of the mixed function oxidases involved in detoxification is higher in bird species with a more generalised diet (Fossi et al. 1995, Rainio et al. 2012) and the match between detoxification abilities and the occurrence of natural toxins in animal diets is discussed by Karasov and Martínez del Rio (2007).

Lerch‐Henning, S., & Nicolson, S. W. (2013). Bird pollinators differ in their tolerance of a nectar alkaloid. Journal of Avian Biology

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