How long forraging?

[aberreef]

Mrs Aberreef got me stumped the other day Her question; how long does a bee spend on a single forraging flight?

Now I know alot depends on weather, forrage availability etc but I really have no idea Can anyone shed any light on this for me

Cheers
Huw

 

[VEG]

the flight lasts as long as it takes to get to the forage and back.

 

[aberreef]

How long does it take them to load up though

 

[VEG]

depends on how much they can carry

 

[DanBee]

Foraging time depends on the species of flower, flower/plant density, and abundance of nectar. Various studies disagree(!) but range from 20 mins to 2 hours IIRC.

Bees fly at approx 15mph, so a mile every four minutes, which means the journey time is generally small compared to the gathering time, unless it's easy pickings a long way away of course.

Unloading time should be under a minute, more than 2-3 minutes and the forager is discouraged from further foraging, otherwise they're straight back out again.

 

[Poly Hive]

How long is the proverbial string?

PH

 

[aberreef]

Foraging time depends on the species of flower, flower/plant density, and abundance of nectar. Various studies disagree(!) but range from 20 mins to 2 hours IIRC.

Bees fly at approx 15mph, so a mile every four minutes, which means the journey time is generally small compared to the gathering time, unless it's easy pickings a long way away of course.

Unloading time should be under a minute, more than 2-3 minutes and the forager is discouraged from further foraging, otherwise they're straight back out again.

Awesome answer thanks

 

[oliver90owner]

Unloading time should be under a minute,

Rest is ball park, this bit is wrong IMO. Walking in, across frames, depositing pollen from pollen sacs and getting cleaned down and serviced (refuelled?), will almost certainly take more than a minute. This is asuming you are not including all these bits in 'flight time', which should then be relabelled as transit time.

Or have we forgotten, or ignored the need for pollen foraging?

 

[nelletap]

I'm analysing some chipped bees at the moment - have done for about 2 weeks. It seems that time in teh hive is more consistent than time out of the hive (majority 40 minutes). In the hive that I am watching, lots of the foragers are also consistently going for 40 minutes; they also often go in pairs or groups and the time duration only varies 1 minute either side (I assume due to rounding errors). however, there is another core of bees out for 66 minutes and lastly a few who are out for either 106 or 116 minutes (I think the variation here was my late night mental arithmetic). Interestingly, overnight the foraging trips are about one third of the volume during the day and slightly shorter. However, the bees I have tracked at night are mainly different bees from during the day so perhaps their normal foraging trip at any time is shorter. I only do the night time tracking when I can't sleep! I can share my spreadsheet with anyone interested though it is mainly just the raw data and often I get the data for a bee going out but not for their return or vice versa. The forage area is the 66 acres of the Floriade expo site near an industrial area in Venlo, Netherlands. Lots of bee friendly planting.
Here is the latest set of data (Netherlands 1 hour ahead of us) the numbers 106229 etc is the event number - 106 thousand altogether so fifty thousand foraging trips documented by the project. I only have about 2000 sets of data.
106229 Marlou in 09:44 106228 Inge out 09:42
106227 Nicky in 09:42 106226 Maaike out 09:41
106221 Toos in 09:39 106225 Ricky out 09:41
106220 Ada in 09:38 106224 Doris out 09:41
106218 Maja in 09:37 106223 Ruth out 09:40

Maja left earlier and I captured that data: 106170 Maja out 08:58
so her trip was a typical 39 minutes. The chipped bees are of course carrying extra weight of the chip.
I've got a lot of data about these two
106168 Marjon in 08:57
106167 Wilke in 08:56
They have been travelling, mostly together, since I first started tracking 2 weeks ago. On the few occasions when they are not together the one comes in to within a minute of the other going out. All their trips have been 40 minutes - I wondered whether as they aged they got better or went on shorter trips. It probably relates more to the crop and location they are foraging. The hwole site has a lot of very similar planting.

 

[YorkshireBees]

Extremely interesting study, I know someone who visited Floriade and told me a little about the bee projects there.

 

[beeno]

Nelletap chipped bees.

Wicked! What do you serve it with? Sorry, sorry, sorry. So great that you are doing that. Always wondered myself. Thought they worked in small groups based on usually three bees coming back together with equally loaded pollen sacks of same colour. The day before yesterday I saw three bees buzzing about in my oriental poppies with equally loaded pollen sacks and they flew off in the direction of my hive. Usually you never see them on anything they are supposed to like in your own garden! Also, there is supposed to be division of labour between bees carrying pollen and nectar. Your studies must be able to prove or disprove this hypothesis i.e. does Maja come back with pollen and nectar. Can I come for tea (a cup of)? Would love to have you as a bee friend.

 

[nelletap]

Chipped bees: I've just seen 2 return that you'd think were working as a pair from the pattern - but they were 3 minutes apart on the times.

The data is freely available online - the only problem is because it shows just the last 5, you need to create and refresh a web query for both arrivals and departures to get the data into the spreadsheet and then you can start having as much fun (!) as me. There is a commercial sponsor for the project - it is their 'community project' but Admin might allow the link - http://www.nspyre.nl/rfibee - otherwise you probably need to Google floriade be a bee project. The chart under the 'weather' tab shows the number of visits per hour as a bar chart with the humidty and temperature as line graphs superimposed.

 

[Outlander]

I like the thought of them having there friend or friends to go off with them, that very cool.

 

[nelletap]

It must have been the point of an earlier post (or the glass of wine) - but I read this last one as 'it is nice they have their fried friends'.......

 

[DanBee]

Or have we forgotten, or ignored the need for pollen foraging?

You are quite correct, I had assumed we were foraging for nectar.

Even longer than pollen, propolis can take up to an hour to unload IIRC.

 

[Into the lions den]

Not scientific, but upon release at the heather, if weather is OK, the first bees are coming back with pollen after about 20 minutes. Almost unbelievable, but last year I had a girl (entymology student) working here with us who is currently off on a research project in Perth Australia, and has come here to work bees the last three summers. She wanted to take notes about speed of settling into foraging.

The first bees were actually working on heather flowers within 5 minutes of release. Within 20 mins the first pollen loads were coming back. Within 30 mins they were arriving at most colonies in the group. Within 40 mins you would never have guessed the hives had been moved they were so settled and going about their business. So....within that time they had orientated and the scouts were back with the initial loads, and the main workforce was getting busy.

Took place at Rothiemurchus, nr Aviemore, July 2011, on completion of a migration of over 500 miles. Bees totally unfazed by the move.

Have no idea about individual bees turnaround times.

 

[busybee53]

Nelletap - absolutely fascinating. Can hardly believe the detail. Will you be writing this up in a form that the not very scientific can understand/obtain?

 

[nelletap]

I do have a blog and I have entered some preliminary observations. I have found some wonderful comments from other bloggers that then help me consolidate and build on that - in particular some comments link to Jurgen Tautz book 'the Buzz about bees. My own blog is on wordpress - search for apiarylandlord - and I think I may have written some under the wordpress blog by Hughenden Bees which documents our project at Hughenden Manor.

The more time I spend on the data the more I would like to write up a few aspects. I think I would like to see whether those who started this project have any other data they can make available to me (there were already more than 80000 records before I realised this data was available) - I guess if they have had sponsors this may not be possible.
Tricia