Bees leaving or entering the colony. Pollen foragers may have pollen in their hind leg pollen baskets or pollen on their body, possibly indicated by color streaks on head or thoraxthorax:
the middle region of the adult bee body, which lies in between the head and the abdomen; consists of three segments: pro-, meso-, and meta-thorax; thorax attachments include three pairs of legs and two pairs of wings
, from the flowers they visit. Under proper flight weather, foragers' flights may be very extensive. Usually flight is directly into or out of hive entrance, but incoming foragers might land on grass in front of their colony or side of the hive before entering.
Foraging represents the last third of an adult worker bee's sequence of hive duties. The forager is usually an older worker bee that has completed hive duties and has moved on to foraging. Foragers support the hive by securing the four resources colonies require: nectar (to ripen into honey); pollen (to process into bee bread); water (to dilute honey and cool and control hive humidity); and bee resins (propolis), the antimicrobial bee glue that helps keep the bee hive healthy. A forager may also be called a field bee.
Heavily laden foragers may land in the grass, on the ground, on the sides of their hives, or on other structures on their return to the hive. This may also occur when entrance foraging traffic is especially heavy. Watching the entrance, it is possible to distinguish foraging flight to or from the colony entrance from worker orientation flights or drone flights in afternoons for mating. Robbing flight entrance also differs but is sometimes hard to distinguish form normal foraging.
With vegetation growth in front of the entrance, foragers may have difficulty when returning to their hive. Beekeepers often provide a landing board before the colony entrance to aid foragers. Use of pollen traps, entrance reducers, robbing screens, or other devices may interfere with forager entry or exiting.
Foragers learn where their hive is via orientation flights as they begin the third week of their adult life. This flight is distinctive. It usually occurs in the early afternoon hours. Bees leave the landing board and fly in a bouncing, roughly figure 8 motion before their hive. They quickly move further away, sometimes circling the hive itself. After a period of one to several days, they become foragers.
Foragers may discover forage sites on their own (as scouts, for example), or they may follow dancing bees. Dancing conveys specific information about location (relative to the sun's position, distance (via energy expenditure), and provide taste and smell clues to forager recruitsrecruits:
older forager-aged bees (generally at least three weeks old) responding to dancing bees seeking to share information about nectar, pollen, water, or bee resin resources
.
Experienced foraging bees may be recognized by their tattered wing tips, which are due to flying within vegetation to reach flowers. They may also have sparse body hairs.
Samuelson A and Leadbetter E. 2017. Foraging by Honeybees. In: Vonk J and Shackelford. 2017. Encyclopedia of Animal Cognition and Behavior. Springer Publishing, New York City, NY, US. https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-3-319-47829-6_918-1
NASA. n.d. Honey Bee Forage Map. HoneyBeeNet. Accessed 2023. https://honeybeenet.gsfc.nasa.gov/Honeybees/Forage.htm
Collison C. 2018. A Closer Look - Foraging Behavior. Bee Culture. Accessed 2023. https://www.beeculture.com/closer-look-foraging-behavior/
