Gimme Some Water

The weather report today said "Feels like 107."  It's been hot.  But I can handle the heat.  The lack of rain is what's really troublesome.  Tonight at prayer meeting, someone suggested "Showers of Blessing" for our first hymn.  The second verse goes like this:

There shall be showers of blessing"—
Precious reviving again;
Over the hills and the valleys,
Sound of abundance of rain.

We would love to hear the sound of an abundance of rain right now!  The earth is parched.  The grass is crinkly and withered and hasn't grown in a coon's age.  In fact, I've only mowed the yard twice this year!  Being new beekeepers, we have been amazed to see the flights of bees coming to the rain barrel on our back patio.  Bees need water, too!

The honeybees fly to the barrel and walk down the sides to the water's edge.  Then they drink.  During the summer, bees use water to regulate the temperature in the colony.  I'll show some photos later of the bees all piled out outside the door of the bee boxes.  For the brood to survive, the temperature must be regulated.  

These worker bees carry the water back to the hive.  House bees meet them at the door.  The house bees bring the water to the comb and deposit it and then turn around and fan the water to create their own air conditioning.  Amazing! This process goes on over and over and over again.  

Sometimes, a bee gets too close and falls in the water.  We use a leaf like you would throw a life line to someone in trouble to help the bee get back to the edge and fly off.  To combat this, we did put a shallow pan with rocks in it, but no bees go to it.  They keep going to the big barrel shown in the photos above.  Our best guess is that the bees' GPS hasn't picked up on it yet.

Bees do a dance called the 'waggle dance' when they get back to the hive.  This dance tells the other bees exactly where to find nectar (and water) and how far and in what direction it is.  The best we can figure is that their dance hasn't corrected to communicate the coordinates of the new dish.  

We'll keep water available for the honeybees at our house.  Hopefully, we'll get some rain sometime in the not-too-distant future.  We pray for those Showers of Blessing.  So do the bees.