Quote Originally Posted by gavin View Post
I've seen bees at my apiary near Errol (on the same day) coming home with the white stripe of Himalayan balsam (they have to fly to the Tay for that) and pointing 5 km away to the SW, and others pointing at heather on a hill 7-8km to the NE. There was one fine day quite a few years ago not far from you GG, just W of Oldmeldrum, when doing some field work on foraging and the approach of a dark cloud caused a mass exit from the field in the direction of a large apiary we knew about 10 km away up the side of a slope W of Rothienorman.

Francis Ratniek's group recorded waggle dances pointing at the moors 'near' Sheffield (11km away, as far as von Frisch took it as well), and there was a 1930s study in Wyoming by John Eckert who recorded foraging 13.5 km away. There is a nice wee article here.

G.
I have just used the link in this thread to relate distance from my apiary (500m, 1 km and 3km radius) to where I have seen my bees foraging. The 1km radius corresponds with the greatest distance I have recorded. This seems to
Work I have found on the foraging range of honey bees (J Insect Sci. 2011;11:144. Foraging range of honey bees, Apis mellifera, in alfalfa seed production fields. Hagler JR1, Mueller S, Teuber LR, Machtley SA, Van Deynze A.) showed that:
• distances travelled by marked bees (leaving to returning from a hive) ranged from 45 m to 5983 m
• on average bees were recovered at about 800m from their apiary
• the recovery rate of bees decreased exponentially as the distance from the apiary of origin increased.

From this, I take that:
1. Sometimes a bee does not do much foraging (50m) when it leaves the hive and at other times it can fly nearly 6km while foraging.
2. Mostly bees stay within about a km of their hive when foraging.

I think it would take an exceptionally dry, warm, windless period in Fermanagh to tempt my bees to forage usefully on the heather about 3km away.