What do the `bees' do when land on the buffet table? Put another way, what do they land on and seem to stay on? I say `bees' because honeybees are pretty selective in what they eat and drink. Wasps aren't. You will find no bees in a wasp trap made out a weak dilution of jam in water. Bees don't like acidic solutions. Nor will you find them (in my experience) on meat or fish. Rarely will you find a bee in the autumn, when nectar (sugar) sources are scarce in the holes made in ripe fruit by pecking birds. (Again, acid.) You will find plenty of wasps. (These observations are limited to the UK.) If the bees seem to be interested in liquids, it could be that there are no water sources easily available to them outside of the buffet area. So if the bees are, or appear to be, drinking, the hotel owner might make a start by providing water sources outside the hotel area. This is most easily done with a shallow pan of gravel placed beneath a leaking tap, hose, nozzle, or whatever. The idea is to give the bees something to stand on while they are drinking. (Because they like to stand on something, they will be much more attracted to a wet towel than to the adjacent swimming pool.) If they get a successful drink, they will return to their colony and distribute the liquid. The colony (I'm writing figuratively) will decide whether the liquid suits its requirements. On hot days it will prefer pure water or weak nectar. (There might, on hot days, be a division of labour, with some bees designated water carriers and others strongly-sugared-nectar carriers.) It will use the water, through evaporation by wing movements, as a refrigerant. On cool days it will prefer a stronger sugar solution. An incoming bee will do a complicated dance (among other things) to communicate the direction and distance of the source of its load. If the colony likes the load, it will send other bees out to the approximate location of the source. So if your hotelier friend is getting a lot of bees on the buffet tables, the home colony(ies) is getting lots of the closest thing available to what it wants. If the hotel is located, for instance, in the middle of an arid region, and sits on its own, (i.e., no local nectar sources in flower, no open water,) then your hotelier might have to destroy or have moved the bee colonies. But that's another story: how to find the home colony of a bee which has just landed on your buffet. A stupid question: does someone keep bees near the hotel? Hope this helps Roger Hardy