So I’m watching a bunch of bees using water from my pond and there are at least two groups. One flies west southwest and up my driveway and out of sight. The other group heads south east, up over a bush, then a tree, and out of sight. I started counting them and there were about 40 outgoing flights in 40 seconds. Which makes 60 in sixty seconds — a minute. which makes 60 times 60 = 3600 trips per hour. If you assume one bee is taking 20 microliters (having worked in a molecular biology lab that’s a pretty good estimate — about a quarter of a drop). That works out to 72000 microliters or 72 mls. And that’s all per hour for 2 hives. There is a third hive which starts coming a little later in the day and lasts longer into the evening probably because of the Feng Shui of the hive :-) .
So a total of 3 hives and 100 mls or a tenth of a liter It is winter and not very hot and daylight is only about 8 hours a day. So if they are tanking up 6 hours out of that 8 hours that’s .6 liters a day to the bees. Which works out to 18 l per month which is pretty close to 5 gallons and that is the highest use winter scenario. Not augmented by water from fog or rain.
Summer will mean higher number of trips per hour, longer daylight, less chance of rain or dew agmentation, and probably a fourth hive heading north west. This would generate a significantly higher water use in the summer.
It has been stated that a large hive of bees can use 10 gallons on a hot day in the summer. I don’t know whether these hives are very big but I bet four medium size hives could come close to that. In addition, my original flight number may be low because recounting it an hour later at 11 a.m. it had doubled.
I am happy to provide :-) and by the way the bobcat, raccoon, coyote, ground squirrels, skunks, and rabbits drink too!
So what are the bees using all this water for? Their hive swamp cooler. They put the water around the entrance of their hive and another group of bees sit there fanning it with their wings. Evaporative cooling just like our sweat evaporates and cools us.
Now think about it! Any toxins in the water are being concentrated right at the entrance of the hive 100X 1000X 10000X. Please don’t put water conditioners, bleach, algaecides, algaefix :-[ or other toxins in your outside sources of water.