Saturday, April 19, 2014

What's In Your Water?

Have you noticed there are some pretty cool ponds and fountains around?  Look at many of the professionally landscaped locations that are installing ponds and fountains lately.

Some of these are very cool, very nice looking.  Some have fish but more ofen than not, they don't.

Bees, honey bees among them, need water just like any other creature.  Honey bees love to go to the edges of pools and ponds to collect water which they take back to the hive for a variety of purposes.  To cool the hive, for drinking, etc...

However, there are chemicals that get applied to many of these decorative ponds and pools that can harm bee colonies and sometimes kill the bees before they can make it back to the hive.  Most of these being algae control products.  Very often, the labels will state that these products are highly toxic to bees (when applied to crops and other plants) but they have no problem dumping them into ponds, water gardens, ornamental pools, etc...

Granted, no one wants algae in their pond or pool, however, how well are the treatments being applied?  Are they just being dumped in whether they are needed or not? Are the amounts adhered to strictly or is just "eyeballing it" good enough?

Algae control products aren't really monitored or accounted for especially in the discussion of beekeeping in urban areas.  However, as urban landscapes are developed in urban and suburban areas to be more appealing and more people are keeping bees in areas that were  already highly landscaped when they started beekeeping, things like public water sources as water forage for bees have to be taken into consideration.

When you want to start keeping bees in your area, it would behoove you to take a walk around the neighborhood looking for water forage sources your bees might visit and find out what your bees might come across and bring back to the hive.


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