How to Pet a Bee

Hey, this is Dirt Farmer Jay from DirtFarmerJay.com. Today I'm going to show you about the foraging behavior of the common honeybee and how different it is from when it is defending its colony. When it's out and about foraging, by that I mean getting water, looking for pollen, getting nectar for stores in the hive, all that sort of thing, they generally are pretty concerned with the task at hand and not so concerned with you. As you can see here, some bees right here that have come up here to this little watering hole which happens to be a bird fountain in one of our outside yards. And there's lots of different pollinators that come up here, solitary bees which do not live in colonies, wasps, dragonflies, birds of course because it is a bird bath and of course lots of bees. We keep this water fresh. If you look right now, it's empty. Just give it a moment here and it'll come back to life. Here's a wasp, here's a couple more wasps, in a moment we'll get a couple bees here. And then what I want to show you is how docile they are because they are not trying to defend their hive. There is no pheromones that are being put off by the queen or by any defender bees saying we've got a problem here. And so pretty much they're just busy doing what they're going to do here. And a moment ago when I started this film I had probably, oh, 10-15 bees here and as you can see here's a little amber one that's landed and I just want to show you here. We'll see here if this even, look at here, I'm touching its wing and it doesn't really care. As you can see there's no defensive behavior. It's not getting upset. Sometimes it'll let you pet their heads even. See there I'm touching its head and it's like, okay, I'll wander away a little bit. Here's another one over here. Let's see if this one will let me touch it a little bit. Yeah, see they're just like trying to get water so they don't care about that. So that's just an interesting thing to know about the bee. Sometimes this gets us humans into trouble like it did me when I was about 7 years old. There's a bee doing this and I thought, I can catch it. And I did. I put it inside my hand and you know the results. I got stung and of course I haven't done that again in many, many years. Hope you like to see this behavior, get a little bit more understanding of our pollinator friends and that out in the fields you can just let them do their thing. One other thing I wanted to mention is that bees sound differently in their buzzing when they're in a defensive mode as well as just doing their regular housekeeping and doing the task to keep the hive robust. And that is when they're flying around like this, they just have this gentle hum. It's kind of like a hmmmm sound, okay? And if they were in a defensive mode trying to warn you off or perhaps a stinging attack is going to start because of some egregious thing that's being done to them, then you're going to get a real edgy sound. It's going to be a real ehhhhhh sound like that versus a hmmmm. So you can just listen for that. Some interesting bee behavior. Hope you found this enjoyable. If you did, like it and pass it on to someone else and visit our channel at DirtFarmerJay.com. Until the next time, this is Dirt Farmer Jay.