Over on tiktok user @nomadicpancakes has observed a group of #bees that have learned to turn on the sensor on a water bottle filling station by walking over the target.
This is just the kind of thing bees are made to learn, they love targets and need to follow them when dealing with flowers all the time.
The interesting thing is that the bee who hits the target produces water for her sisters, herself less so. But these #eusocial girls seem to have that worked out!
Bee dehydration is a serious problem. Why not design a water feeder just for the bees?
Some of the design challenges:
-standing water causes mosquitos
-bees can drown in water that's even a cm deep, ideally the feeder should reproduce dew drop like conditions
-if too many other things trigger the feeder it will waste water or be empty
It could be as simple as a runway that the bee lands on, then after walking through a tunnel there are a few drops of water to drink.
@futurebird when we had bees we'd put out a bowl with some rocks and glass beads in it. The bees could land on them and drink without falling in, for the most part.
@futurebird how about pushing water up from below, through a material with channels here and there, so it makes small droplets that sit on the top surface? the amount of water on it would be measured, maybe optically, and controlled by something as simple as possible. no skeeters, no drowned bees. the block of material would need to be removable so it could be cleaned from time to time (peroxide, wash, whatever), to prevent clogging by bacteria or whatever.
@futurebird I have a large flower-pot saucer in a shady front yard spot with a bunch of rocks & one in a sunny backyard spot with a bunch of glass blobs, which I keep filled with water. There are lots of little birds in my yard & also wasps, so mosquitoes. My big problem is keeping the sunny one with the glass blobs free of algae & not letting them go dry.
I love the idea of making it bee operated using a sensor. Something just so cute about how they learn to land on targets to make things happen. They have wonderful little fuzz-covered minds.
Simply putting some pebbles in a dish with water is a decent solution, although you need to keep adding more water all the time so it won't dry out.
An electronic feeder might seem excessive, but with the right design it could be placed in very dry environments with a 1 gallon supply of water dispensed drop by drop ... and only when bees trigger it, lasting for weeks.
A water pump attached to a hose with a few very small holes in it will produce a mist. Rig that to a light sensor with a timer cutoff set to just a few seconds. Gallon jug reservoir. An arduino controller to tie it all together.
@futurebird@pixouls don’t we have passive ways to keep a bowl at a predefined level so long as the connected reservoir isn’t too empty? I’d think that sort of bowl with a soft (flexible, maybe cloth) cover that’s just a little more porous than buoyant could have constant droplets or shallow water above the cover. Or just put small rocks in the bowl. So the reservoir would need infrequent refilling, but no power would be needed
@futurebird@pixouls maybe you could even make that just with passive components, like using the water level in the 'pool' to seal the source by not allowing air in anymore (similar to raising an upside-down glass full of water above the water line, it'll empty only when air can get in)
@futurebird what about a very small solar-powered heat-pump like device which uses condensation to pull moisture from the air, which would generate just the desired dew-like droplets.
If only that hydration was a major problem to solve for our honeybees unfortunately it is cultivation by beekeepers that has lead to their probable extinction. If only we would leave nature be natural. The biggest error was moving Queen’s and their keepers to different countries along with the killer Varrea Mites.
@futurebird Cool! But those are not bees, they are yellow jackets (a type of wasp) and they are probably trying to build a nest using the sensor hole as an entrance.
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