The previous post describes the comings and goings at a honey bee nest. Now let’s watch the bees as they collect the food they will bring back to their colony.

Pick your favorite flower. One of my favorites is Bird’s-foot Trefoil (Lotus corniculatus L.).

This plant grows close to the ground in dense clumps. Its leaves are divided into leaflets in the manner of a clover, which is a fellow member of the legume family. Three of the leaflets of each leaf are conspicuous, giving rise to the name “trefoil.” Its flowers are like those of other legumes in the subfamily Faboideae such as sweet peas, vetch, or alfalfa: bilaterally symmetrical with gently lobed petals whose shape conceals the inner structures in a way befitting their role as a reproductive organ. The flowers are yellow, but it is a yellow that is breathtakingly intense. They are displayed only slightly above the height of the soft green leaves, like gems resting on velvet.

Look ’em up: http://beautifulflowerpictures.com/Wildflowers/photos/birds_foot_trefoil.jpgBird's-foot Trefoil

Honey bees are avid visitors to BFT (as I shall call it). Watch one bee. She cruises low over the patch, just a few centimeters above the plant. In a seamless transition, straight flight turns into a landing maneuver, and she alights on a flower. With the precision of a jeweler opening a watch case, she pushes in at the cleft in the middle of the flower, and the petals part to admit her proboscis to the tube where the nectar can be found. She lingers a few seconds at most, then pulls away, takes off, and quickly lands at another flower. Same thing again. Sometime she seems to approach and then veer away from a flower at the last second, as if noticing something amiss, and then land at another flower nearby.

This sequence continues, leading the bee to probe many flowers in the patch–missing some but revisiting few that she has already tried. Then she breaks this rhythm, and leaves this patch altogether to cruise, as if under the pull of an unseen force field, to another patch nearby, where she resumes the quick flower-by-flower pattern of visitation. She ignores the purplish thistles and other flowers that she passes, as if intent only on finding the next patch of BFT. These cycles and epicycles may go on for as long as you have the patience to watch.

Other bees are present in the patch, but they seldom interact. The numbers are too few to make encounters very probable. In the rare case that two bees do come in contact, they seem simply to ignore each other–moving on to other parts of the patch.

Very occasionally you can see a bee that has finished collecting her load of nectar. Upon lift-off from a blossom, she does not fly to another flower or another patch. Instead she flies upward and starts performing swooping maneuvers–arcs or circles that repeatedly change direction. These start low and tight, then widen as the bee gains altitude. After a few seconds of this, the bee breaks into a straight, fast flight away from the patch.

Toward home.