LITTLE WATER COLLECTORS

That water is essential for human life and activity is obvious. Perhaps less obvious is the need for water by other creatures, including even the smallest.

For example, one may recall seeing a gathering of butterflies at the edges of mud puddles. Typically, they may include small "blues", sulfurs, white cabbage and even swallowtails. Interestingly, butterflies do not drink water because they have to have water. They seek water for its mineral content--thus, the minerals in muddy water. After drinking, they expel the water and keep the minerals, which are essential for their lives. In a miniature way, these butterflies are water treatment facilities.

Honeybees offer a more complex example, because they actually collect water and haul it back to their hives. Foragers seek water from many different sources, including mud puddles, as well as edges of ponds, rain drops on leaves and bird baths. Honeybees use collected water in several ways. Water is an essential ingredient for making food for larvae. The recipe includes pollen, nectar and water ingested by bees and internally processed for the food for brood.

Water is also used for cooling within the hive. Think of the device car owners in the 1950s would hang on the outside of a windows of their cars, which cooled the interior by wind blowing through and evaporating water in the device. Bees spread water within the hive and evaporate it by fanning their wings to produce cooling. Bees also use water to make liquid again stored honey that may have crystalized. Again, in a miniature way, honeybees are water distribution systems.

That bees frequently are seen collecting water at bird baths suggests that they do not necessarily need "clean" water. Regardless, one should be encouraged to maintain bird baths relatively clean. However,water gathered by bees from cropland may become tainted with pesticides, which could become an adverse contributor to colony health.

Interestingly, while bees collect water, they do not like to get their feet wet and dislike rain. As new beekeepers soon learn, one should avoid opening a hive on a rainy day, as bees can be particularly unhappy in wet weather. Maybe, in that respect, bees and humans share a similar attitude. ©Daniel J. Kucera 2017