Can you tell the difference between artificial light and sunlight? I think they can.

 

I never heard of this but i am a newbee.
Do you think they will produce more honey or something?
I have my bees in the woods and some days they get started early and some days later, depends on weather,humidity,tempature and light i suppose.
I think it would take alot of ights to get bees out earler than they want to be.

 

at the same time you may have to get the flowers to open up quicker. sounds like a of extension cords will be needed. lol

 

I,m not sure about the artificial light, but at about 8am this morning my weed eat sure woke mine up.

 

Thanks for the smart reply acebird. In fact, you are dead wrong. Look up seasonal affective disorder and the blue light treatments that work wonders for people who suffer from SAD. Those people know that its not sunlight, but it still helps them with their depession. In addition, bees are BUGS! They may have amazingly complex social behavior, but they are still bugs.

 

Thanks for the smart reply acebird. In fact, you are dead wrong.

What wavelength do you expect to use for this artificial light? Inferred would be my first choice (invisible). How do you think the bees navigate when YOU can't see the sun? If they relied on visible light where I live they would be screwed. SAD is a different ball game. Crank up your Vitamin d intake. Everyone in the North is deficient.

 

Anyone with an observation hive soon learns that bees hate light, at least light inside their hive. Direct exposure of the hive's entrance to the Sun's morning rays may be a slight advantage, especially on cool mornings, but I think that you would need to light up the surrounding 8,000 acres to stimulate bees to forage early. They take their cues from the Sun and use its light to fix the hive's location and to navigate back home. Our girls may be busy as bees, but I think they still like their beauty sleep in the mornings. The number of day light hours however is a huge advantage when making a honey crop. Ask anyone who keeps bees on the Northern Great Plains.

 

I have hives in some yards that get sun on them an hour earlier than some other hives in the same yard. The hives that are in the sun first, fly first, even on mornings that the temp is above 70 degrees at daylight.

 

I may try this with my hives. They are behind a large bush/bank (to the East of the hives) and the direct sunlight doesn't touch the hives until almost an hour after sun-up. I have found that is a great time to change the feeder water though. Light and warm enough to work, but they are still passed out. Very interested to see if anyone has tried this as well.

 

I'm quite new to bee keeping, but I had always assumed that the bees chose the time that they leave to forage had more to do with the interior temperature of the hive. When the sun hits the hive it warms up and the foragers can leave as they are no longer needed to keep the brood covered and warm.

 

but I had always assumed that the bees chose the time that they leave to forage had more to do with the interior temperature of the hive.

Going along with that it is my observations that the stronger more populous hive will forage first even before it warms up. The brood chamber will be held at about 92 degrees come heck or high water. Large populous hives have the population to keep the brood warm and still have a force that can forage. Small ones lack that resource.

 

I watched my bees yesterday morning with this very issue in mind. Not so much about introducing artificial light but just what factors determine when they forage. On cooler mornings I have noticed they will not forage until as late as 10. obviously there is abundant light and they still do not come out. But yesterday was a warm morning and they where leaving the hive at 6 a.m. pretty much first light. I have a motion sensing flood light on my back porch. it does not seem to fool the es into thinking it is still day. From what I have read bees know where the sun is. I have never heard of them getting confused about it either. They navigate by the sun so I am not sure you want to fool with that even if you could. You just might not ever see your bees again.

 

An interesting page on bee navigation and the sun:
http://utahpests.usu.edu/htm/utah-pests-news/up-winter-2012/honey-bee-navigation

If bees cannot “see” the sun, how do they locate it and use it for navigation? One important clue they use is ultraviolet light. Especially on clear days, the bees identify the location of the sun as the area of the sky with the least ultraviolet light. In fact, experiments have shown that a bee may identify any object in the sky as the sun, as long as it is less than 20 degrees across the horizon, and less than 15% of the light associated with it is ultraviolet; the amount of polarization is unimportant. In comparison, a human would identify a 0.4°, completely unpolarized, white circle as the sun, while a bee might identify a 9°, 75% polarized, blue square as the sun. It seems like this would be a problem, but not for a bee.

and

Another clue from the sun that helps bees navigate on cloudy days is polarized light. The light coming from the sun is actually not polarized, but when it bounces off particles in the atmosphere, it becomes polarized. A bee actually sees concentric circles of polarized light throughout the sky. The bee knows that the strongest polarization lies in a circle that is 90° from the sun, and uses this information to estimate the sun’s location. Patterns of polarized light are so useful that a bee only needs to see one patch of sky that is 10° wide to determine where the sun is.​

 

Many years back my brother read an article that mentioned painting the landing board sky blue. The reflected light was supposed to get the bees to forage earlier/later in the day. We were building two queen boards at the time so they were painted light blue but I have no idea if it made a difference.
I do set all my hives facing either east or west to take advantage of the light.

 

The bees won't forage until there is something for them to collect. I assume "scout" bees head out at first light, but if they come back empty (or don't come back until there is something to fill up on), the rest stay put.

Earlier light will do nothing to "encourage" foraging unless you also fool the nectar producing plants to put out more nectar earlier as well -- see comment on extension cords.

Peter

 

Interesting idea. Where I am at the sun doesn't hit my hives (or my property) until three or four hours after it rises. There are several forage areas around me that are in the sun that early so if the bees where awake they would have plenty to do.

 

"The bees won't forage until there is something for them to collect. "
It maybe surprising but some plants ( i'm thinking of Eucalypts) are at peak nextar at 1 am!
Rather the light , I find that temperature is the major trigger for the bees to start flying.

 

I am not sure if your information is correct. I found this study on times of days eucalyptus bloom as well as their major pollinators. This study states bees are a pollinator, however, bees are not the only pollinator. If a plant is producing nectar at night it would likely be not to attract bees as bees use UV light and the patterns on flowers to find them. While moths and other nocturnal pollinators are more likely to visit at night, it is notable many of these visitors only come for the nectar, which would be during the night.

 

I had a hive on my (covered) porch for a couple of years, just a few feet from my grill. I have a floodlight over the grill for when I'm cooking after dark. In Summer, some bees would come out at night, and fly around and walk on the floodlight.

Some of the bees would then go to the french door to the porch and be all over the windows, attracted by the light on inside. Some of the bees would eventually end up in the house and would fly around whatever lights were on. There is a bowl around the dining room chandelier lights (close to the porch door) and I would often have to take the bowl off and empty the dead bees out of it.

The bees wouldn't come out of the hive in Winter.

After the first Summer of ducking bees while grilling, I learned to toss a blanket over the hive so they wouldn't see the light.