Flowering plants often manipulate the foraging behavior of their pollinators to exploit them. For example, flowers might produce cues facilitating pollen pickup by pollinators, while simultaneously reducing their foraging effectiveness. Generalist bees foraging on flowers frequently use a pollen foraging behavior termed floral sonication, which involves vigorous vibration of the anthers. By manipulating the intensity or occurrence of floral sonication (associated with pollen collection), a flower might exploit the bees to collect less pollen than would benefit it. We therefore tested how chemical cues associated with the anthers (the male flower reproductive parts) mediated floral sonication by the generalist bee, Bombus impatiens. We found that floral sonication was elicited by anther chemical cues (crude solvent anther extracts). Surprisingly, the intensity of floral sonication (measured in decibels) and its occurrence was not affected by the concentration of anther chemical cues applied to flowers, even at very weak concentrations. Our results also suggest that anther chemical cues eliciting sonication are of low volatility: sonication was elicited to a similar degree by extracts left to volatilize on artificial anthers for different controlled lengths of time. In ongoing work, we are assessing the threshold strength of the chemical cues eliciting floral sonication to facilitate their identification. Altogether, our results suggest that while chemical cues are key elicitors of floral sonication by bees, flowers likely cannot readily manipulate effectiveness in terms of pollen removal via these cues.