Hi all
It is interesting, in light of the fact that Colin Butler just passed away, that his work was cited repeatedly in this recent study. They state:

> Honey bees are known to collect and, in some cases, prefer "dirty water" that contains salts (Butler, 1940).

Looking at the work by Butler, he used field tests to determine the attractiveness of water to foraging bees, rather than lab tests which look at proboscis response. In doing so, he reveals an interesting observation:

The bees showed a marked
preference for the cow-dung water over the distilled water, but, in the case of the
urine the bees flew over it in a large group but very few of them collected it. This
is in complete accordance with observations made in the field. Although bees have
been observed to be strongly attracted by urine they will seldom collect it, unless
it is considerably diluted.

It would therefore appear that some olfactory substance or substances contained
in the distillates produced from rain water, cow-dung water and urine, is the
factor responsible for attracting the bees to these substances in preference to
distilled water.

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.

The honeybee prefers dilute sodium chloride and ammonium chloride
solutions to distilled water.

It does not prefer concentrations of these salts higher than N/20 solutions
and solutions of various other salts to distilled water.

The honeybee is probably largely attracted to such sources of drinking
water as rain water from gutters choked with decaying organic matter, sewage
effluent, etc.: by a water perception sense coupled with an olfactory appreciation
of various volatile substances contained in these sources of water.

The volatile substances present in the distillates from the various naturally
occurring solutions examined could be absorbed on to animal charcoal to a large
extent, in which case the resulting supernatant fluid was found to have lost its
great attraction for the honeybee and was no longer clearly distinguished from
distilled water.

[In other words, bees use olfactory cues to locate sources of water, and they tend to find water with odors more readily than cleaner sources, but their actual preference is for slightly salty water. This would include dilute urine]

PLB

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