According to Baumgartner
& Roubik (1989), bees search for salt, water, and mineral
compounds when visiting carcasses.



In Europe during the periods of heavy industrialization, it was a well known approach to spike water for bees with iron to supposedly off set the toxicity of certain toxic industrial chemicals.   From my own studies and that of one of my graduate students, we know that bees can produce metallothioneins.   


Most every beekeepers has seen bees collecting water from muddy puddles.  I saw fluoride poisoning from bees collecting water from puddles around a stock watering tank fed by a deep artesian well that contained fluoride.  The levels of fluoride in the puddles was much higher than in the stock tank due to evaporation.


One of our UM Master students did a project where she was able to show  that bees preferred water with minerals.


On the other hand, one of our  MT commercial beekeepers (who passed away many years ago) was an experimenter.  He got the bright idea of turning pallets into shallow trays - in order to catch rain water - so the bees wouldn't have to fly to get water.   What  he  got was a swamp of brackish water under every hive.





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