“Can you follow a bee to its home?”

Photo by Christian Birkholz

Say you’re out in a wildflower field and you get a hankering for some honey.  Could you pick out a nearby bee and just follow it to the source of golden sweetness?

Got honey?

Your first step is to make sure you even have the right kind of bee.  Turns out there are about 20,000 species of bee in the world, and less than 2% of these are group-nesting bees like bumble bees and honey bees.  The rest are solitary bees, which you would only be following back to a honeyless bachelor pad.  But honey bees are reasonably easy to identify (for help, seek guidance from your preferred state university’s extension office), so let’s assume that you find yourself a target.

How fast and how far can you run?

Since you want to follow a bee back to its hive, you’ll have to stalk it until it’s loaded down with pollen and nectar and ready to deposit the load at home.  Since you’ll be following a bee weighted down with its collection as opposed to an unfettered speedster, you'll only have to travel at the speed of a pollen-laden bee, which flies at about 10-12 mph. 

No sweat, right?  The “Fastest Man on Earth,” Usain Bolt, clocks in at nearly 28 mph, so clearly a fit human should be able to outstrip that bee.  But wait – how far will you have to go?  If you’re practically on top of the hive, a sprinting speed such as Bolt’s (or even half that) will do you fine, but chances are that you’ll have to sustain your speed for a while.

Bees typically forage close to the hive, but venturing up to four miles away is not uncommon.  A 2008 research report by Hoopingarner and Waller reports foraging ranges reaching up to a crazy eight miles from home.  You might have to chase the bee for a ways, so sprinting, in this case, isn’t so advisable.

The laden bee speed of 12 mph is about the speed maintained by an elite marathoner, so unless you’re one of those elite, you’re likely to lose your bee over a long distance on speed differential alone. 

But say you’re pretty speedy for a human and your bee is pretty lazy for a bee.  You still have the problem of terrain.  Once a bee is full-up with pollen, it tends to fly in a straight line back to the hive (hence the phrase “make a beeline”) without consideration for the trees, shrubs, rocks, fences and traffic that you will have to navigate.  And forget about catching a break if the sun’s not out; bees do use the sun to navigate, but they also use metal maps with landmarks, so they’ll be flying right home despite the weather and regardless of your obstacles.

With all this in mind, I’m sorry to say that, unless you’re following a honey bee across a perfectly flat area with a bicycle to help you out, you will probably be left in the dust. 

But do not despair!

Just because your vision of traipsing off through the daisies after honey has been sullied doesn’t mean you can’t find the bee’s treasure another way.  There are bee-following methods available that may be more effective than just up and taking off after the first pollen-laden insect you see.

The standard suggestion among wild honey finders is to put out a bowl of sugar water – faux nectar, if you will – and take note of the direction taken by your gorged bee visitors.  Move yourself and the sugar bowl in that direction a bit, and keep on following departing bees until you get to the hive.  For a really detailed account of one way to do this, including bee-capturing box schematics and a supply list detailed right down to the wide-brimmed hat, check out this guy’s instructions for “beelining” as it’s called.

Another method, supposedly attributed to Australian Aboriginies, is to catch a laden honey bee, affix a bit of down to it with wax, and follow it as it flies super slowly thanks to the extra weight and drag (although from the account I read, the bee-followers still tripped over bushes and stuff during the pursuit.)

That method sounds like a precursor to what bee researches do nowadays when tracking which bees go to which hives and when – by marking them with paint, or, more hi-techly, attaching a barcode to captured bees and installing a laser barcode reader at the hives’ entrances.  (And if they wanted to annoy all the forest creatures they could include the “beeboop” scanner sound like at the supermarket.)

Where do I find these bees in the first place?

Honey bees range all over the earth, with the exceptions of the Sahara and arctic regions.  Look around flowering plants in your area and cross your fingers.  There is widespread concern these days that honey bee populations are dwindling, so if you have the ability and would like to help out our friendly honey-makers yourself, consider planting a bee garden with some of their favorite flowers.

And what is totally cool about bees and their favorite flowers is that not only do bees select flowers based on appearance and smell, they can actually sense the flowers’ electric fields!  Crazy.

What if a bee follows me home?

Those who find symbolism in the acts of nature might say that a bee following you is a sign that you are blessed with the gifts of community, communication, fertility and/or industriousness.  For bees who find symbolism in the acts of mankind, a bee following you means that you are wearing something that makes you seem like a flower, or that you have found the hive and the bee is escorting you back from whence you came.  Sprinting, in this case, may be advisable.