Dylan Bettencourt
While people travel overseas for holidays or business, bees do it to find a virgin queen to mate with.
Beekeepers on the Isles of Scilly in southwest England disproved the idea that bees do not cross water as they marked the animal with colour coded pen markings.
Scillonian beekeepers launched a project called Game of Games to prove that bees are in fact island-hoppers that fly between the archipelago’s islands in the hopes of finding a virgin queen to mate with.
Hundreds of male bees were marked with different colours to jot down the five different inhabited islands the animal visited.
Female bees are also being investigated but early indications show the females only cross islands to forage rather than in the search of pleasure.
Jilly Hilliday, a former florist who took up beekeeping a decade ago, said the idea that bees are afraid of flying over water is “mainland talk” and that proof would be huge for them.
Trustee of the Bee Improvement and Bee Breeders Association Nick-Bentham Green said the animals “travel long distances away from their colony in search of virgin queens”.
“We know this is happening. We’re absolutely sure of it. We’re trying to prove once and for all, not anecdotally but scientifically, that drones do cross water,” he said.
Evidence has also been found of bees visiting other hives on the same island which has not yet been confirmed as “island-hopping”.
Co-editor of BeeCraft magazine Stephen Fleming gave animal lovers the assurance that pen markings used on the bees are non-toxic and cause no harm to the animals.
“As it’s going across the comb you can just gently mark it on the thorax. Some of them will run about a bit, in which case you just pick it up gently and hold it by its thorax and mark it on its back, a bit below the head,” he said.
Image source: @TreeHugger
