Bees behaving strangely today

Thanks for the bump

"right to left then back left to right"...could it bee just beecause? Let them bee.

I'm here to help.

They are doing the Waggle Dance :)

The Waggle dance is a term used in beekeeping and ethology for a particular figure-eight dance of the honey bee. By performing this dance, successful foragers can share, with other members of the colony, information about the direction and distance to patches of flowers yielding nectar and pollen, to water sources, or to new housing locations. A waggle dance with a very short waggle run used to be characterized as a distinct (round) recruitment dance . Austrian ethologist and Nobel laureate Karl von Frisch was one of the first who translated the meaning of the waggle dance.

[link to en.wikipedia.org]

^ that's pretty neat

It's likely they are just a little antsy as much of the country drifts into winter. Foodsources tend to become scarce, known as "dearth" and they get to acting all sprts of bizarre. Just my opinion, I do this for a living.

Thank you for the link, this is very interesting. What I saw though was not figure eight, more like figures of minus sign. It felt like they are nervous...

Wow, I never heard that...Are you a beekeeper?

Yup, That's what I do for a living. Equipment (hives etc) manufacture and Hive management.

My husband and I started keeping bees this summer. We have 2 hives, so we are in no way experts on this, but my husband has read a lot about the bees and this is what he said it could be.

At the end of the "bee season" (we are in a cold climate), the female worker bees kick the male drones out (they are truly useless eaters with no other purpose except to mate with the queen) to conserve honey stored for the winter. Until the drones die off, they might engage in the type of behavior you witnessed today.

Just a theory. As I said, we are not experts!


.

Thank you for sharing

Last Edited by emerald_glow on 10/25/2014 06:01 PM

When is the latest time you can collect honey from hives before winter?