The early Honeybee catches the nectar
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Ever thought of Honeybees as being like people? Early risers, late risers. According to research, the earliest rising bee catches the best flower and ultimately the best meal. A study has found that bees are better at learning new odors in the morning. This early brain power may have evolved to help the insects sniff out flowering plants and forage for nectar more efficiently.
An experiment in which a team tested more than 1,000 bees is described in the journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology.
Previous research has shown that most flowers accumulate their nectar during the morning, so this would be the period during which learning many new odors would be most useful to the bees.
Read the BBC story HERE.
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It will be done!…and my neighbour will be mightily impressed!
Mike : whilst loving Bees I have little knowledge about them. Now THAT is interesting old bean! Ta for that. Sugar water!
How do you ‘feed’ them? Just leave a small bowl out or something? Drip it into the hive? I’m fascinated here!
A neighbour has just set up two hives in his garden and I’d love to be able to pop around with a wee bit of knowledge!
Bees need some “bee-Gatorade” to get their “bee-ness” going. Transplantation exhausts them.
It is important to feed them manually by using a quart (glass) jar, with a lid, into which you have punctured many very tiny holes. You place this jar upside down on top of two sticks or whatever you can find on top of or near the hive, so as to leave just enough space so the bees can get to the sugar water under the lid.
To make the sugar water fill half the jar with good ole’ sugar and then mix water. This needs to be done for about the first six months to ensure survival of bee majority.
I hope this helps old bean.
That hive mentality Krell mentions is very interesting, don’t know how it works. You always see ants touching each other then continuing onward, maybe it’s some kind of chemical transference? Maybe the chemical has the ability to be smelled (or something) over short distances, or affect though over short distances?
I have heard of the chemical scent traces for ants and communication. It just seems like there is more than that though. For ants, I have seen them go several tens of feet from where the food is back to their “farm”. It would seem that they would need a whole lot of chemical scent for that
distance.
They would need a butt as big as the one I saw at the hot air balloon festival last night.
One more reason for celebrating big butts.
Watch the ants. They tap their butts every so often releasing a trace of pheromones that the other ants can find and follow. So next time you hear someone referring to a big butt say they want to “tap that ass” you can ponder whether it is the visual reproductive cues or the smell they are after!
I can do the same thing but it takes cheap Mexican fast food.
I have always thought of bees and ants as almost like cells of a larger body. They seem to be so connected together in some mysterious way. This connected system, IMHO, is still not understood or discovered yet.
I would not be surprised if it involved some sort of not yet discovered communication like telepathy but for very short distances.
I do a lot better in the morning too. Everybody should have a bit of nectar early in the day.
LOL!! Agreed Fly 🙂
Me too. I start the day full of piss and vinegar, and it’s typically all down hill from there. If I wake up past 8, I feel like I have wasted my day.
If I can’t sleep until at least 9 I feel like I don’t have the energy to enjoy the day 🙂
I got up at 6:30 this morning and have guilt feelings.
Is that late for you One Fly? I get up at 5, usually sooner (around 4:30) even in winter when there is no daylight reward for hours to come. 8 to me is “sleeping in”.
Yes it is. Duing the summer get up about 4:30 and in a few weeks that will change to five as the days are shorter and we start later. No matter what after doing this for 25 years or so you just wake up early and there’s no changing it.
I am the same way. I’d be a great fisherman or farmer. Not so good at catching meteor showers. I lay down for more than 3 minutes after 10pm and I am out.
I am a “bee” guy. As a matter of fact I have been “bee sitting” a neighbor’s hive for the last couple of months. It is a new hive so they need to be fed until such as time as they become familiar with the territory. As a result I have to make sure they have plenty of “sugar” water. This provides them with the necessary nourishment to forage on their own. Great post.
I wonder if this is true for other pollinating insects- like wasps, flies etc?
well I’ll bee damned!….love bees. Incredible creatures.