Honey Bees and the weather

     Today it was raining outside and so when I went out to the rosemary where I normally watch the honey bees I found only a few where normally there are thirty to forty honey bees flying around. Here begged the question, what do honey bees do when it rains? While researching this I found out that many hives will stop flying away from home a day before a giant storm hits. Somehow it seems that they can predict weather changes. While researching a bit further I found this story about hurricane Gustav and how all the bees disappeared about 2 to 3 weeks before the storm actually hit. Here is a letter from a woman who noticed this strange happen stance.

Hurricane Gustav

 

     Fema set a deadline for picking up debris and tree limbs and will only pass one more time with their dump trucks.  So, I helped my brother Ronnie cut up some large tree branches still resting on his trailer this past Sunday. And today, (Tuesday), with me being busy working on a paint job, my brother decided to come over to my side of the street to gather up tree branches and twigs that I had already cut.

This is interesting, similar to your post about frogs gathering before earthquakes occur. When I had painted a local church statue a strange phenomenon happened.  A ball of honey bees swarmed above the statue of Mary I was painting and then a minute later they swarmed in  the top of a tree about 10 ft. away for another minute, and then they left as quickly as they had arrived.

A few weeks later as I pondered about that event I went out into my yard to observe a natural bee hive inside the base of a tree in my front yard that had been there for years. But the bees had moved away. This was about two or three weeks before Hurricane Gustav came, I even told my brother that the bees had moved away.  I waited and waited, and not a single bee could be found.

The next few days and weeks I had looked again.  Still no bees.  At the time my brother and I had just concluded that it was a natural occurrence, that for whatever reason, the queen bee had moved the hive away.  We forgot about it.

But today as we approached the familiar tree with holes at the base and one a little higher up, we both noticed something peculiar. The bees are back!  My brother speculated that perhaps somehow, they sensed something was endangering them (the hurricane) just weeks before the storm hit.

bees are simply amazing!