What does the bee eat?
Bees feed on nectar and pollen collected by foragers — older worker bees with beefy flight muscles. Some foragers gather nectar, which they store in an elastic pouch in the gut known as a “honey stomach”; others collect pollen grains, packing them in “baskets” on their rear legs.
While your sweet treats may be attractive to bees, most bees use pollen and nectar as a food source. Worker bees gather both pollen and nectar from flowers to feed to the larvae and other members of the colony. Nectar is a sweet fluid produced by flowers to attract bees and other animals.
So what are these two vital foods and what exactly do honeybees eat? They are nectar and pollen. Nectar, eventually to be converted into honey, is a liquid solution of sugar and water. Nectar is a honey bees carbohydrate.
Bees feed on and require both nectar and pollen. The nectar is for energy and the pollen provides protein and other nutrients. Most pollen is used by bees as larvae food, but bees also transfer it from plant-to-plant, providing the pollination services needed by plants and nature as a whole.
Honey bees, especially in a nectar dearth, find ripe fruit very much to their liking. They have been known to feast on plums, peaches, grapes, apples, figs, and pears.
Bees fly a few tenths of a mile up to 6 miles to gather nectar. Bees leave the hive 15 times per day and visit around 100 flowers each time – that's 1,500 flowers a day! Bees can collect up to 4-5 pounds of nectar each day.
Because nectar is predominantly sucrose (with some fructose, glucose and trace minerals). White sugar, also called granulated sugar or table sugar, is the most similar to nectar that we have available. Therefore, white sugar should be your choice in feeding bees.
Sprinkle some cloves.
Cloves are also another excellent deterrent for those black and yellow insects. Bees hate the warm and spicy smell of cloves, so putting a few of them around your eating location can be very beneficial.
Most bees (with the example of the honey bees) are herbivores, feeding on pollen and nectar from flowers. Few species, with the example of the necrophagous bee (Trigona hypogea), display predatory behavior meaning they feed on animal protein drawn from both corpses and live prey. What Do Bees Eat?
They often feed on pests and thus help in maintaining the well-being of a garden. Apart from feeding on butterfly caterpillars, beetle larvae and other insects, they may also feed on nectar and are thus pollinators as well.
What does the bee queen eat?
Queens are fed only royal jelly, a protein-rich secretion from glands on the heads of young workers. Worker larva are fed bee bread which is a mixture of nectar and pollen. All bee larvae are fed some royal jelly for the first few days after hatching but only queen larvae are fed the jelly exclusively.
Honey bees collect and store nectar and pollen, and this constitutes the bulk of their diet. Through a process of repeated regurgitation and subsequent storage, evaporation and fermentation, nectar is converted to honey, which can be kept indefinitely and is rich in carbohydrates.
