A: Honey bees are attracted to sugars, and may be especially attracted to liquid sweets. This is why they may be seen at your picnic or backyard buzzing around your watermelon, soft drinks or frozen treats.
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.
Grow flowers that attract bees.
Bees are especially drawn to blue, white, yellow, and purple flowers. You also want to prioritize growing single flowers (which have a simple corolla with just one ring of petals) over double flowers (which, like ornamental roses, have multiple layers of petals).
Add plants in the mint family, including peppermint, lavender, basil, and oregano. Bees also like rosemary, sage, thyme, chamomile, marjoram, and bee balm. The heady perfume of these and other herbs often calls bees to visit your garden.
Feeding dry sugar
Medium to strong bee colonies can be fed dry white table sugar placed on hive mats or in-trays under the hive lid. Bees need water to liquefy the sugar crystals. They will source water from outside the hive or use condensation from inside the hive.
Bees also have a distaste for lavender oil, citronella oil, olive oil, vegetable oil, lemon, and lime. These are all topical defenses you can add to your skin to keep bees away. Unlike other flying insects, bees are not attracted to the scent of humans; they are just curious by nature.
Please note – providing bees with sugar water is only ever a temporary fix and should never become their main diet (that would be like a human swapping three meals a day for three cans of fizzy juice).
Bees are naturally drawn to sweet smells and hate the smell of peppermint, citronella, geranium, Eugenol (also known as clove oil), eucalyptus, rosemary, Cedarwood, citrus, vinegar spray, and especially garlic. Knowing what smells bees dislike is essential in case of emergencies.
Bees follow you because Sweat is sweet to bees.
Some bees are attracted to human sweat. Sounds gross, but it's true. These bees are usually metallic in color and rather small and harder to notice than their yellow and black counterparts. These bees can sting but aren't known for being aggressive towards humans.
They have aggressive tendencies and are overprotective of the hive. Often when you have cranky bees, you will be unable to get near the hive or you will get stung. Sometimes these bees chase you for just being within eyesight of the hive.
Use a few inches of sugar water, water with jam, soda, fruit juice or another sweet liquid in the summer and fall months. Adding honey will attract honeybees, so it's important not to use this as a sweet bait. Add a bit of vinegar to the mix to keep bees out of your trap.
They can also see blue-green, blue, violet, and “bee's purple.” Bee's purple is a combination of yellow and ultraviolet light. That's why humans can't see it. The most likely colors to attract bees, according to scientists, are PURPLE, VIOLET and BLUE.
Many types of trees including plums, apples, crabapples, peaches, and pears are good food sources for bees. Varieties come in fruiting and fruitless types. Many fruiting varieties need bees to produce fruit. Most of these will flower in the spring.
Scientists have found that honey bees are especially sensitive to the taste of sweet things (sugars) and salty tastes. Honey bees stick their tongues out when offered something potentially appetizing!
The short answer is yes. 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.
If you see bees around you, try not to move too quickly. Don't jerk toward or away from the bee, freak out, jump up and down, whatever. Instead, move away from the bee sloooooowly . If the bee knows you're there and you're not threatening it, it'll probably leave you alone.
They may fly at your face or buzz around over your head. These warning signs should be heeded, since the bees may be telling you that you have come into their area and are too close to their colony for comfort both theirs and yours!
If a bee lands on you, don't make any sudden movements
When a bee or wasp lands on you, it's better if you sit still and just try brushing them off gently.
Bees are indifferent to white but actively dislike red, black, brown, and other dark colors. This is because these colors often represent a threat to their natural habitat rather than food. In addition, red appears black to bees because they do not have receptors in their eyes to perceive red.
Honeybees generally attack only to defend their colony, but will also attack if they are seriously disturbed outside the nest. Common sources of attack stimulus for honeybees include alarm pheromone, vibrations, carbon dioxide, hair, and dark colors (Crane 1990).
If you want to help the bees with drying and capping, make sure you have both a lower hive opening and an upper one. This allows a circular airflow where drier, cooler air comes in the bottom, and warmer, wetter air leaves through the top.
Do bees sleep at night? Bees rest and sleep at night. Which might seem obvious, but it wasn't studied scientifically until the 1980s when a researcher called Walter Kaiser observed their sleep-wake cycles and found that honeybees sleep an average of five to seven hours a night.
As you perform routine hive inspections, always observe how much honey is being produced. When your bees have enough comb in the frames and honey stored for the winter, you should stop feeding bees. Discontinue feeding bees sugar water when there is honey in the supers intended for human consumption.