Honeybees prefer clean water - Stanwood Camano Beekeepers Association

Unexpectedly, our results showed that honey bees expressed a strong preference for distilled water and the least mineralized waters (i.e., rainwater and 0.1% dilution of slurry water).

Graph showing that bees prefer distilled water rather than other choices offered (rainwater, swimming pool, pond, or water containing sheep, cattle or horse manure)

Irrespective of the temperature, bees preferred the cleanest water supplied (temperature ‘0’ is 23.5 °C, with -1 and +1 being one standard deviation, or 6 °C, lower or higher respectively; data from Le Bivic et al., 2025

As the ambient temperature increased, the bees made more visits to the water feeders (‘Quelle surprise’, after all the study was conducted in Avignon, France), but the preference for the cleanest water remained unchanged.

All of which demonstrates that bees prefer clean water, and if you observe them feeding in dirty puddles it probably means that there’s nothing cleaner available close by.

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An association of beekeepers in the Stanwood Camano Island area