A few comments:
In September of 2015 I got a new well dug. The old well was a 24' deep bored well and high in iron. The new well is 98' deep and tested at around 800 mg/L CaCO3, if I remember correctly. Within hours (minutes?) of running the new water to the cattle waterer, the bees were all over it. It was really wet and rainy when I got it dug so the bees had lots of options for where to get water and they'd always ignored the old well water. So yes, bees have preferences for different types of water. I don't personally know what those preferences are, but they have them.
There was an ABJ article a year or two later about mineral preferences in water. I'll look up the article tomorrow if I remember. In the meantime, Bonoan et al's "Seasonality of salt foraging in honey bees (Apis mellifera)" Ecological Entomology (2017), 42, 195–201 is a similar if not the same study. It's open access. The authors were testing honey bee preferences for water with different minerals compared to deionized water through the spring, summer, and fall.
Their general conclusion is "as floral resources change in distribution and abundance, honey bees similarly change their water-foraging preferences. Our data suggest that, although they are generalists with relatively few gustatory receptor genes, honey bee foragers are fine-tuned to search for micronutrients. This ability likely helps the foragers in their search for a balanced diet for the colony as a whole."
I have no idea how to recognize signs of specific mineral deficits in individual honey bees nor in honey bee colonies. The very concept is a little foreign to our thinking about honey bee health.
However, I do know pesticides and temperature and moisture extremes can have impacts on pollen viability and morphology and all sorts of other measures of quality for pollination (google those search terms and you'll find many, many articles). It seems a small step to then wonder if pesticides and climate extremes could also be impacting pollen quality for honey bee nutrition.
I've wondered about the impact of pesticides and climates extremes on not just the pollen's mineral content, but also on its lipid and protein content and on its fungal and bacterial communities. I'm curious if something in here might be part of the reason why we see colonies failing to thrive in certain situations.
Where I'm going with this: it'd be nice if we could figure out the signs of bees or colonies suffering from specific mineral and nutritional deficiencies, despite the appearance of adequate food stores. The best answer could maybe be attained via a PhD. The bee manager answer could maybe be attained by just providing mineral supplements in the bees' drinking water through the production season and seeing if there is any noticeable difference in colony performance.
Tracey
near Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.
PS: Oxalic acid dribble and CaCO3?! I used the dribble method for two years on my nucs and found it a useless method for mite control. Not wanting to proclaim the emperor had no clothes, I quietly moved on to more effective mite control methods. Maybe that's why it wasn't working for me.
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