First Feeder Test

On Monday morning, we drove a few blocks down the road to the organic farm on Pomona College, where we paid a visit to the two resident beehives.  Our goals were to check if the feeder worked the way we expected it to and to see how well the bees would respond to it.  After we donned bee jackets to protect our faces, necks, and arms, the beekeeper led us over to one of the hive boxes, opened the lid and blew smoke inside to pacify the bees, and then took the box apart frame by frame to show us the pattern of combs (brood comb close to the center, bordered by pollen comb, with honeycomb around the perimeter) and point out the differences between the drones, queen, and worker bees.  The bees gradually became agitated as their hive was disturbed, so we left them alone after finding the queen and moved on to the other, larger, hive, which the beekeeper told us was the stronger of the two, in order to test our feeder.  Following the methodology for training bees to a feeder outlined by Thomas Seeley in The Wisdom of the Hive, we placed the feeder on a stool directly in front of the hive entrance, propped a block of wood between the hive entrance and the stool, and laid a trail of sugar droplets from the hive entrance to the feeder.  It was late morning, and most of the foragers exiting the hive seemed to already have a destination in mind, flying purposefully off into the distance as soon as they came out into the open.  The ants milling around the hive found the sugar trail almost immediately.  After about twenty minutes, however, the first bee made its way up to the sugar source on the feeder, and more bees soon followed.  By the time we were ready to pack up our things and leave, there were at least six bees at the feeder, and they eagerly followed us as we moved the feeder away from the hive to disassemble it.  The reluctance of the bees to let go of the feeder indicated both that we'd successfully trained them to recognize it as a source of nectar, and that it was a high quality source of food in comparison to what else was available that morning.

The feeder in front of the hive box.  We painted the wooden part of the feeder because bees show a preference for blue and yellow over other colors.  The feeder jar was filled with an approximately 2.5 M sugar solution (over 50% sugar by volume – a high concentration in comparison to natural sources), and both the nectar and the petri dish underneath the feeder were scented with aniseed oil in order to attract bees.  We placed a wooden box on top of the stool to raise the feeder to a level at which bees would see it when exiting the hive.

Bees (and ants) begin to follow the sugar trail leading up to the feeder.

The first bee finds the sugar source!

Around the circumference of the glass jar, there are eight tiny grooves cut into the plate, in which the sugar water is supposed to pool to give the bees troughs to drink from.  However, the solution leaked out a bit all around the base of the jar, and since the box the feeder was sitting on wasn't level, a large pool of sugar water formed at the front of the feeder, which the bees initially preferred.  We wiped up the pool a few minutes later to encourage the bees to explore the rest of the feeder.

Eventually, the bees found all of the grooves around the edge of the jar.  Some bees, however, drank the solution that leaked out from underneath the edge of the jar between the grooves.  This is a design flaw that we need to correct before we attempt to measure feeding from the eight designated spots.