Bees may survive a swim by heading for the dark [COMIC]

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Rommie Analytics

Bees may be best known for buzzing through the air. But they are surprisingly good swimmers, too. The insects can paddle through the water using the bottoms of their wings. And a new study shows that waterborne bees prefer to swim toward dark areas. This strategy might save them from drowning.

Zach Huang and others studied this behavior in honeybees and mason bees. Huang is a bee researcher at Michigan State University in East Lansing. The team shared its findings February 10 in Communications Biology.

A graphic tale" with animals drawn around the letters

a bee wearing pink goggles swims across a shallow pool toward a rocky shore.

“You think this is the best tool to use here?” The one holding the stick says: “They don’t make life preservers this small!”

“Beep, boop, I love pollen!”

They wrapped the bowls with white paper that had a section of black printed on it. Then, they carefully tracked 85 bees’ swimming paths to the bowl’s edge.

This helped confirm Huang’s suspicion that bees in the wild would swim to the shadowed edges of water they fell into — and live to fly another day.

“Me swim good…”

“Go bee!” Another yells “Woohoo!”

Sick bees couldn’t find their way to the dark. So pesticides might make bees more likely to drown. Understanding this and other possible changes to bee behavior from pesticides is important to avoid harming bees around farms and gardens.

“Decorating?” The one painting the bucket says, “No, I’m helping a friend!” Text (below image): If bees automatically swim toward the dark, maybe a black stripe inside the bucket could steer the buzzy bathers to safety instead.

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