Water, Water Everywhere

I got a call from one of my staff about a swarm of bees in the Gaffield Children's Garden at Matthaei Botanical Gardens. (Reminder - Matthaei Botanical Gardens is where I and a number of other beekeepers have our hives.) Staff have seen this "swarm" every day in the garden, and were wondering whether I would want to gather them, or if it was okay to go ahead and exterminate them. Here is a picture of what they are seeing:

All you beekeepers are probably thinking the same thing: this set-up looks pretty much exactly like a bee water dispenser. Honey bees need pebbles or other little islands to rest on while they drink.  Those bees in the picture are part of a stream (pun alert!) of steady customers who've found a water source a bit closer than Fleming Creek.

About a hundred bees typically hang out in this spot at any given time. The reason I put "swarm" in quotation marks is that 100 bees is not a swarm. A swarm should have thousands - even tens of thousand - of bees. With a literal million honey bees living in the dozen or more hives at the botanical gardens site, exterminating the hundred that are drinking in the children's garden might piss the bees off, but it won't solve the problem. We'd do better just to make this location a little less ideal for honey bee to drink. Removing the pebbles and having a deeper pool of water would do the trick. We'll just take care to do it early in the morning, before the bees head out to do their work.

Or we could just put up a sign to help kids and their parents understand what's happening here, and to warn them to tread with caution.