![]() The dancing bee will waggle back and forth while moving in a straight line, circling around to repeat the movement. The pattern of the dance tells the others the distance and direction of the feeding site. The dancing bee will carry back the scent of the flower patch and even give the watching bees a taste of the nectar to help them find the area with ample supplies of food resources.Īt first glance, the bees appear to be wildly flying about and making random noises, but each movement and buzzing sound indicates detailed information about the location they have found. The others in the hive will watch to learn the location of the best flowers to forage. When worker bees discover an ideal foraging location, they will return to the hive and perform a unique waggle dance on the honeycomb to alert the community that they have found food supplies. When a foraging bee returns to the nest, she will need to let the others in the colony know where she found the best flowers for pollination. They are social insects that will use specialized moves, scent cues, and even the exchange of food to communicate among the colony. Honey bees live in a complex, advanced society making it necessary to have developed the ability to communicate important information through the evolutionary process. Honey bees and bumblebees are both polylectic. While polylectic bees can forage on many different kinds of plants, they do have favourites and will visit the same type of flower in each foraging trip. Polylectic bees provide an essential service for farmers growing multiple or sequential crops. Most bee species will forage for pollen and nectar from a wide range of flowering plant species. Monolectic bees are rare, but crucial to the evolutionary journey of both the bee species and the plant species, as they are both reliant on the other to continue the pollination process. Some species of bees will pollinate one species of flower and only that one species. This process assures cross-pollination within one species of plant. Some bees are said to be weak oligolectic bees, meaning they prefer certain plants, but will collect pollen from others if their top choice is not readily available and accessible. Most of these types of bees will collect pollen and nectar only from a specific genus of flower that their larvae need to properly develop and mature. Some bees will forage single or specific types of plant species, while others have a wider reach and more diverse selection of various kinds of flowers to gather their food storages.īees that visit a limited number of plant species and varieties are classified as oligolectic. ![]() There are three basic foraging habits bees use to collect and store nectar and pollen to feed the hive and provide for the winter months. These female worker bees fly from the hive, often up to miles away to forage for food until they die at around six weeks old. Bees and the life of their hives depend on the worker bees heading out to forage for enough nectar and pollen to sustain the colony. Worker bees spend their days foraging for the flowering plants that will yield the most amounts of nourishment for them and the rest of the hive, collecting as much nectar and pollen as possible to bring back to the nest so it can be stored and used throughout the winter months to sustain the colony until the next spring.įoraging is a crucial yet dangerous job that bees of all kinds must perform to feed the hive and propagate the species. ![]() The process of bee foraging varies between species, but the concept is the same throughout all species.
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