Dying Bees on my Buddleia

[Lawick]

Hi everyone, I was just wondering if this is something anyone has come across . I know there is an increase in dying bumblebees and have seen quite a few myself on my travels. But coming home this evening and walking past the buddleia on my drive I noticed several actually dead, or seemingly so, on the bush. I have noticed a few dead and a few lethargic ones around the area for the past few weeks.

The plant has lots of purple flowers but also brown ones which have died away already, I thought it may have been the wet weather, a lot of the osteospurmums have died away as well. Could it be something toxic or a disease or has a pest?

I feel really sorry for then apart from them being an very necessary part of the ecosystem not least my garden!!

Would be interested in any thoughts. Many thanks L

[Alice]

Welcome to the Vine Lawick.
I'm no expert on bees or anything else but a few thoughts for you.
I have very many bees in my garden.
I've seen a few dead or dying bees.
I don't use any chemicals so I'm sure it's nothing I'm doing.
Bees have a life expectancy like all else, they have accidents, they have reasons why they die - just like us.
They are very temperature sensitive and can't fly once their temp goes below a certain figure (I think it's 33 degrees but I could be raving)
They can only carry a certain weight but sometimes get carried away and go beyond that and can't fly and have to stay out all night and get cold and can't fly until they heat up and sometimes they die - or look dying.
I might have dreamt all this Lawick.
See what others think.

[rustylady]

Bees do sometimes overdo the flying and get tired and need a rest, not always in the most suitable places. If you find any that just seem really tired and lethargic, you can feed them a drop of honey (just put it on the surface in front of them) and they very often recover and fly away.

[Graham S]

Has it been raining heavily or have you had hails stone? We had this last week, alot of bees on my Echinops got caught out in the hailstone/rain and next day they were dead.

[Harry T]

I read somewhere that you should NOT give them a drop of honey because apparently some foreign honeys spread the disease that is currently affecting the bee population. Use a drop of sugar water instead.
Harry

[Waffler]

I also heard you should give them sugar water. Is it possible that the lethargic - rather than dead - bees are a bit high on nectar?
A few weeks back, hubby saw a bumble bee in the pond, seemingly unable to take flight. he got the pond net and tried for ages to scoop this daft creature up, who had attached itself to some pond weed and kept being dragged under when hubby caught the weed in the net. Luckily, in the end we did NOT let that bee go gentle into that good night and instead ended up stumbling about on the patio for a while. It looked a little frantic, so I scooped it up and put it on a nearby flower, whereupon it ate/drank like it's life depended on it (it probably did). I spent an age transferring it from flower to flower as whenever it tried to fly it spiralled to the ground. In the end it did fly away though, which was lovely! Just thought I'd share.

[purplekat]

If you want to try feeding a bee then it's a mixture of 2 parts sugar to 1 part water - you should use cane or beet sugar (which most is anyway).

Bee's need the temperature above 16C to fly, but as others have said, it's a very busy time of year so they quite often get exhausted.

This is from the bumblebee conservation trust website

Bumblebee nests grow throughout the season, and produce new males and queens in autumn. Throughout the life of the nest a large number of smaller worker bees help the nest to grow by collecting nectar an pollen - these are the bees that you see out and about in summer. These workers only live 2 weeks or so, and then sadly die. It's therefore quite normal to see a small number of dead bees in the garden. So long as you are still seeing live bees in the area, then it's unlikely to be something new that we should be worrying about.

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[OllieMartin]

Random alternative:

If you have a Red Hot Poker in your garden, just tap it into your hand, it will shed quite an amount of very sweet water (You can taste this yourself). Just give some of this to the bees, it will save you time in making sugar water.

Or you can try it anyway for a bit of fun, it's like sucking the back of a white dead nettle flower.