Bee Forage in Ohio Webinar

[Countryboy]

A guy working on his PhD at Ohio State put on a webinar looking at bee forage here in Ohio. (Just looking at the slides in the pdf will give you the gist of the presentation - listening to the webinar doesn't add much.)

Interestingly, bees do better in agricultural cropland landscapes, compared to urban or forested areas. While the urban areas may offer more floral and pollen diversity, the cropland areas offer a larger volume of target nectar sources the bees can take advantage of.

White Dutch clover and goldenrod are the two major nectar sources in Ohio.

http://u.osu.edu/beelab/honey-bee-forag ... andscapes/

[Biermann]

Hello Countryboy,

Thank you for this interesting link. I listened to the full presentation and it supports the small knowledge I have in regards of honeybee feeding habits. It seems that they (honeybees) are interested in efficient feeding and food gathering rather then diversity and odd pretty flowers that produce very uneven and doubtful production results.

I have noticed this in my area were on misses bees on certain plants without knowing why and finds them in other areas that are not clear to our human understanding, but it must be related to: what rewards to I get out of my and my colleges efforts most efficiently! No time should be wasted! The only answer I still have is: busy as a bee!

Cheers, Joerg