What do bees eat? Nectar, right? Well… that’s not all. They’ll gobble up a lot more than you might think!
Bees love sugar. Though their primary source of it may be nectar, they also love to get into fallen fruit:
I took that photo when I was at Taylor Gardens Nursery the other day. She’s sipping away at the juice seeping from a fallen muscadine grape.
Bees are amazing little creatures. I think if we knew all the weird stuff that went into our honey, we might be shocked…
Here’s another shot of this little sugar fiend:
SIDE NOTE: My new-ish camera has a nice close-up mode that I’ve been using to good effect snapping pictures of insects. The bee in the photos let me get nice and close and I’m happy to see the autofocus worked well.
I’ve had issues with close-up shots on some previous cameras. I remember one day when I was trying to photograph aphids on a willow tree. I took something like 30 shots and most of them were blurry. The autofocus was wildly zipping in and out and there was no manual override. The perils of trusting a shot to a computer chip…
When I lived in Tennessee, I noticed that my honeybees also greatly enjoyed the fallen pears from my pear trees. Anyone that got split or damaged attracted bees – they’d eat off those pears all day long.
Now… back to bees.
If you have bees, you’re probably beyond being surprised at what they’ll eat. They’ll go after candy, soda, lemonade, fermenting fruit and all kinds of weird stuff. If it’s sweet, the bees will go for it.
When I was a kid, one year Dad and Mom took us on a long summer vacation all the way from Florida into North Carolina and then on into Virginia and deep into Upstate New York where my great-grandparents lived. One afternoon while passing through Virginia, we stopped for a picnic on the grass. Mom made sandwiches and Dad was drinking a Mountain Dew from a can (I remember that back then he drink Mountain Dew or Mello Yello when we were on vacation – and only when we were on vacation. The rest of the year I don’t think he drank any soda at all) when he noticed a little bee buzzing interestedly around the rim of the can and pointed it out to us kids. The little worker kept buzzing around so Dad shooed it off. A few minutes later he must have quit paying attention, because he took a swig of his soda and suddenly spat it in an explosion across the grass.
“The bee was in there! I almost swallowed the bee!”
We kids thought it was hilarious and scary at the same time. Imagine swallowing a bee!
Childhood Lesson Learned: Bees Like Mountain Dew
Yep. They’ll also steal your watermelon, nibble your candy, rob honey from a honey bear and lick up spilled juice.
If it has sugar in it, bees will probably eat it.
On a related note, I’m currently co-writing a new book on southern beekeeping along with my friend Allen the Beekeeper. Unlike keeping bees up north, beekeeping in the south is a whole different ballgame and Allen knows his stuff. As for me, I’m learning as we write. He’s the expert… I’m just the wordsmith.
I’ll keep you posted – we’re about a quarter of the way done with the book and it’s shaping up nicely.
For now, here are two videos Allan and I recorded together on beekeeping:
4 responses to “What do bees eat?”
Yes, if it has enough sugar…. They also gather honeydew here, which is the sweet excrement of insects like scale. I’m not aware of any other local sources here but oak. One oak tree I have can produce tons of honeydew from scale insects and the whole tree will be a buzz of humming insects during that time as the scale are producing large crystalized chunks of sugary stuff.
Another thing they like is urine. I suspect that is because of the mineral content. I read a story when I was a kid in which two kids used urine as a bait to track bees back to their hive. Sure enough, I see bees all over my pee buckets (saved for fertilizer) and anywhere I pee outside. If I’m not diligent about keeping a lid on it they end up drowning in there.
I was also literally just thinking about the voiceover for a bee video I have brewing in the background and specifically about how the general public think of bees as collecting nectar when they actually spend a whole lot of time gathering pollen as well. Of course they don’t eat it directly that I know of, but take it to the hive to raise new bees. I don’t know how much their time is split between getting pollen and nectar, but I’ve watched them enough to know it’s a slow process to gather pollen, even when the source is abundant.
So glad I found your site and books. I live in Cross Creek, so just a few miles from you and greatly appreciate your experience with the same climate, rain, and insect issues. I have had a long interest in permaculture and a short history of trying it so your books and blog have been invaluable. Sorry to hear your nursery is not up…which leads me to my question…Where can I get some of these plants? I went to Gainesvilles farmers mkt and found some great stuff but do you recommend any localish nurserys or other farmers mkts? Looking fwd to your bee book!
Are they also liking some of it because of the water content?
It just struck me, that i don’t know how Bee’s eat, I mean from there nozel or stinger, maybe both? Would someone enlighten my ignorance…Thank you!