3: Soybeans as a nectar source for honey bees in northeast Ohio

Honey bees (Apis mellifera) depend on floral nectar sources to create the honey they rely on as food. In turn, humans benefit directly from the pollination of insect-dependent crops and other important plants; bees’ work is valued at $20 billion a year. However, there are some plants which may not depend on honey bees for pollination but benefit from their work. One such planti is the soybean, which covered 86.9 million acres of the US in 2018. Soybeans bloom during the late summer, and are one of the few floral resources available to bees at that time. By analyzing the bees’ waggle dance language, we determined honey bees recruit to this nectar source. Bee dances were recorded with a video camera trained on two glass-walled observation hives weekly during soybean bloom, and the videos were processed using FIJI image analysis software. Finally, we plotted locations inferred from bee dances on crop maps to determine where bees are foraging. This information was used to determine the attractiveness of soybean flowers to bees, however limitations of the dance analysis revealed bees' propensity to forage close to the hive.