Bees and the pool

I know it's been a while since I posted anything but work and the garden have kept me busy. I am going to echo here a thread that's been discussed recently on the local beekeeper mailing lists, with a personal angle. How to keep the bees away from our pool.

It seems bees like a water source that has a strong odor and Chlorine is one of those odors and so a pool becomes a great attraction. At first this was cool, we could watch the bees drinking from the edge, or from the string holding up the thermometer or drinking off the mat where people get in and out (which of course gets nice and wet). But, some days there's a lot of bees and sooner or later ....

So we experimented, we moved the mat so as not to have a really big and easy drinking source, we moved a waterer I had already made closer to the pool and we removed everything from the pool that could be a "float" for the bees to drink from.

The waterer itself was pretty simple, one of those large dog water dispensers (works like a water cooler) and with a little added honey-b-healthy it was pretty strong smelling.

At first we put it next to the area where the bees had been drinking before and after a few false starts it worked. I had tried a simple plastic float to keep the bees from drowning in it but that seemed not to work so well so we fell back on the local do-everything tool of pine straw.

Now it seems very popular and while a few bees do fly around the pool on the way in and out it's the waterer they head for. So, day by day we've been inching it away from the pool and again it seems to be working.

While I don't claim this will work for everyone, and you never know it may not work for us for long, it's been an interesting exercise and certainly easier than trying to create a more permanent water source closer to the bees themselves.