HONEY BEE CLEANSING FLIGHTS…JUST CLEANSING?

ABSTRACT: The first major cleansing flight during the winter in a honey bee apiary was witnessed on February 6, 2021. A light snowfall and freezing rain prior to the flight allowed delineation of the distribution of distances from the aggregation of hives of fecal depositions and immobilized honey bees fallen to the ground. Five transects were surveyed radiating from the aggregation of four overwintered hives to collect the data. The frequency distributions of these events were fit to Gamma probability density functions and then a test of the following hypothesis was constructed. Are cleansing flights solely comprised of local defecation by workers and then return to the hive? Or do workers also commence foraging in suboptimal air temperatures for flight? We found evidence that cleansing flights are comprised of two behaviors, local deposition of feces and long-distance foraging. This is based upon a significant difference (P < 0.001) between the mean distance from the hives of fecal deposition (3.01 ± 0.36(se)) and immobilized bees on the ground (9.49 ± 1.21(se)).