I have had this problem with other livestock on two different farms,
cattle and pigs. I have bees on a farm with horses but they get their
water from a muddy area in the pasture.   Bees seem to like mud,
especially livestock manure mud. At the problem farms I had the farmer
move the water that the livestock used. On the same day I put out a
tub that the livestock could not get to. I set a board in the tub to
absorb water and give the bees a place to land. Since you can train
bees to flavors or smells I put sea salt in the water to make it taste
different from the livestock water. I chose sea salt because my bees
near the ocean like the water in the salt marsh a lot. The flavor can
be anything such as crushed mint leaves to make the water different. I
drizzled about 3 ozs of honey on the wet board to attract the bees to
this water source. It didn't take long for them to develop a taste for
salted water and to leave the livestock water trough alone. You can
not let the water source dry up, you can slowly stop adding the flavor
to the water as the bees get used to this new source of water. There
needs to be something in the tank for the bees to land on, I chose a
board because I needed a place for the honey. The honey of course is
what got the bees to go to the water source. I had the farmer put
honey on the board for a little over week. The amount of salt was
about 1/2 cup to 5 gallons of water, stir it good. This worked to
retrain my bees to a new water source on both farms.

Karen

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