Hi all
My reading of this brings me to a different hypothesis. In the paper that John Chesnut cites, they refer to Butler's work.
Butler (1940) concluded that honey bees prefer dirty water
based on strong odour cues. While this provides a proximate
mechanism bywhich honey beesmay find dirtywater, it does not
provide an evolutionary explanation for this behaviour. [He]
did not find that honey bees exhibited mineral preferences when
foraging for water; Butler’s (1940) study was done in the spring.
Odd that they sort of dismiss Butler because of these reasons: done in spring, no evolutionary explanation. On the other hand, I find Butler's work to be persuasive: funky water is attractive to bees because: the odors make it easier to find, easier to remember. Butler states:
Once the honeybee has found a
source of drinking water that it prefers to others in the immediate vicinity of its
colony, by means of these senses, it is probably kept there by a gustatory sense,
since it has been shown that the honeybee prefers sundry dilute salt solutions to
pure water. It is almost certain that in this way a complicated conditioned reflex
is set up, an expression of the so-called "memory" of the honeybee, which causes
it to visit one particular source of water many times in preference to all others.
That this conditioned reflex can persist over a considerable period of time is clearly
demonstrated by the fact that honeybees will in the spring visit the site of a drinking
fountain, that they used in the previous autumn, even though the fountain had been removed.
¶
But beyond that, one must always keep in mind that even if there is a correlation between salts, impurities, etc in the water and its attractiveness to bees (and other thirsty critters) that does not prove they are getting something they need from it. It may that they are simply more readily attracted to some sources because of the odor & taste, whether it's "good" water or not.
As an analogy, look at human alcohol consumption: people have definite preferences, most do not prefer to drink pure alcohol mixed with water, although this would provide the same effect as a mixed drink or beer. In fact, consumption patterns are very complex:
> Wine drinkers and mixed-drink drinkers clearly confirmed the hypothesis that more alcohol is consumed and higher BACs are reached when they are given access to their preferred alcoholic beverages in ad lib drinking situations. Subjects preferring beer, however, imbibed significantly less ethanol in the form of beer than wine drinkers and mixed-drink drinkers consumed in the form of their preferred beverages.
From this we see that people drink more of their favorite beverage, than one they don't like as well. Except with beer drinkers, this did not hold true. Why is that? Are bee drinkers more moderate or is it that most beer tastes nasty?
PLB
refs
BUTLER, C. G. (1940)THE CHOICE OF DRINKING WATER BY THE HONEYBEE. Entomologist in Charge of Bee Research Laboratory, Rothamsted Experimental Station
Kidorf, M., Lang, A. R., & Pelham, W. E. (1990). Beverage preference, beverage type and subject gender as determinants of alcohol consumption in the laboratory. Journal of studies on alcohol, 51(4), 331-335.
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