How far do bees travel to forage?

The numbers

Why a honey bee's maximum is not her preference

A ten-kilometre flight is possible and expensive. Flight costs energy, and a forager who spends more sugar reaching a patch than she brings back has cost the colony rather than helped it. Honey bees are therefore economically rational about distance in a way that is measurable: when good forage is close, dance-decoding studies find most recruitment inside a kilometre. When the landscape is poor, the same colony sends foragers far further, and the average dance distance rises accordingly.

This makes the waggle dance an unusually good instrument for surveying a landscape. Read the dances in a hive over a season and you have a map of where forage actually is, at what distance, drawn by the animals themselves. It is one of the few ways to measure habitat quality from inside the organism using it.

What this means for planting

• A honey bee will find your garden from a considerable distance. For honey bees, what you plant is a small contribution to a very large foraging area, and the landscape matters far more than any one garden.
• A solitary bee will not. If a mining bee's nest bank is four hundred metres from the nearest flowers, the flowers might as well not exist. For most wild bees, forage and nest site have to be close together or neither works.
• This is why 'plant flowers for bees' is incomplete advice. Nest sites — bare soil, dead stems, old walls, undisturbed ground — need to be within a few hundred metres of the forage, and providing one without the other helps far less than people expect.
• It is also why habitat connectivity matters at landscape scale. A flower-rich patch surrounded by two kilometres of nothing supports honey bees and very little else.

How the distances are known

Three methods, each with limits. Decoding the waggle dance gives distance and direction for honey bees directly, from the bee's own report, and is the richest source. Mark-and-recapture and harmonic radar track individuals physically, which works for large bees and is impractical for small ones. And microsatellite genetic analysis identifies siblings across a landscape, which infers how far a mother must have ranged — the standard approach for solitary bees, which are far too small to carry a transmitter.