Geo Imirie stated:
>BEES LIKE DIRTY WATER.

        It's a sidelight, but so do people.
        In some third-world aid projects, people presented with pure water
piped into their village for the first time complain that it 'lacks body'.

> Bees want
>the minerals found in "dirty" water.

        Has it been researched which components of the dirty water they
want?  I doubt it.
        Can I slap in the good story of Paul Ehrlich's tapeworm?  The
famous Stanford prof before going on research in the remote tropics a
couple decades ago swallowed a couple segments of a selected tapeworm sp.
Once in the white man's graveyard he drank & ate like the natives, and
experienced no gut problems.  Upon returning to Stanford he took a
purgative and shat a 13m tapeworm.  The inference is that the tapeworm is a
symbiont, protecting us from various pathogens; only if the human falls
upon hard times does it become a drawback that the worm gets first claim on
what you eat.
        I imagine the bee gut may well contain similar (presumably
microbial) endosymbionts.  Why bother with non-nutritious pure water when
you can get it fortified by organic components that your internal team will
process to advantage?  Minerals may well be among the paydirt, but I
suspect organic materials are also.

        BTW, while on the search for negatively- or positively-charged
water, watch out for striped paint too.  And make sure the water has no
electrical connection to earth.

R