LOVELAND, Ohio — Many at last month’s Southwestern Ohio Beekeeping School in Loveland consider themselves first-timers at this hobby. After a full day of how-to sessions and the purchase of beekeeping equipment, most said they were anxious to get started.

 

The only damper to the enthusiasm came when attendees were reminded that hungry honeybees appear to favor flowers in agricultural areas over those in neighboring urban areas.

 

“Bees will find nectar wherever they can,” said retired Ohio State University professor and bee specialist Dr. James Tew. “They will go to the areas of highest productivity but they never put all their foraging eggs in one basket, and they will always check out their environment.

 

“Though they prefer the rural setting, they’ll allocate some scavengers to check out city parks and such.”

 

Though Tew was not a presenter at this year’s gathering, he responded to worries that bees may not find the urban environment attractive. A study by researchers at OSU said this newfound discovery has implications for urban beekeepers, and challenges assumptions that farmland and honeybees are incompatible.

 

The team positioned honeybee colonies in an apiary in a central Ohio cemetery, in the middle of where urban residential development transitions into farmland. They left the colonies to forage for nectar and pollen wherever they preferred.

 

The bees, studied from late summer to early fall in 2014, overwhelmingly went for the agricultural offerings instead of the assorted flowering plants in and around the urban neighborhoods nearby, said Douglas Sponsler, who was a graduate student in entomology at OSU at the time. 

  

“Throughout the study, the honeybees’ haul always favored plants from the agricultural area, and hit a high of 96 percent of the pollen collected at one point,” Sponsler explained. “Honeybees didn’t seem to care that much what the floral diversity was. What they wanted was large patches of their favorite stuff.”

 

Goldenrod was particularly popular, the researchers found. The bees’ agricultural

foraging preference was especially pronounced at the end of the season, as the colonies prepared to overwinter – they preferred the lush nectar found in the rural settings.

 

Dr. Reed Johnson, an assistant professor of entomology at OSU, said the discoveries made in this study helps explain the ongoing hardships of urban beekeepers, who are growing in number in Ohio and elsewhere. “When the bees have a choice, they go to the farmland,” he said. “We’ve had trouble keeping our urban colonies alive, so this makes a lot of sense to us. There’s this popular perception that urban places are better for bees because of the diversity of plants. 

This is showing that, at least in Ohio, the agricultural areas are actually superior and that’s despite the pesticide use that’s out there.”

 

Researchers videotaped, then analyzed, the telltale “dance” patterns of bees returning to the three study colonies. Translated by scientists, these moves explain what direction the foraging bee has been in relation to the hive and how far in that direction.

 

The second part of the analysis, or pollen identification, confirmed the dance-derived findings. When the honeybees came back to the cemetery, they flew through a screen that allowed their bodies in but scraped the pollen off their hind legs and into a collection chamber. By separating the grains of pollen by color and shape researchers could determine what exactly the bees were foraging.

 

Sponsler said there’s plenty of room to improve urban plant diversity and keep honeybees sated there as well as in the country. “There’s no reason why our urban landscapes can’t be full of flowers,” he said. “It’s just that we’ve inherited a certain preference toward things that look like golf courses rather than things that look like

prairies.”