# At what age do bees start their orientation flights?



## thenance007 (May 25, 2011)

Do they do it within a day or two of being born or closer to 3 weeks when they are ready to start foraging?


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## Nantom670 (Jul 29, 2011)

I see many bees flying just outside my hives and I believe they are taking their orientation flight. I believe they are very young and lets not forget that they do not soil their hives so they will be leaving the hive long before the 3 weeks I would think to go just outside for that and that is when I would say they take their first orientation flight. I have watched mine just fly around just outside the hive for 20 minutes of more during the day and then it seems the head nurse bee must give an alarming buzz and they all start filing back in, a sight to behold. :scratch:


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## NasalSponge (Jul 22, 2008)

This is a good question. If bees do not move to the job of forager until day 49 (http://www.bushfarms.com/beesmath.htm) ...the question is do they take OF before this time? When I watch OF many of the bees do the usual concentric circles then fly off.


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## psfred (Jul 16, 2011)

I think (but am not totally sure) that they do not orient until they become foragers. Nurse bees do not leave the hive, and I don't think they orient and then return inside.

Bees can change roles as needed, though. I got a kick out of watching my captured swarm orient after I opened up the hive, quite a show (for both of them, actually). With a swarm, quite a few bees that would otherwise be nurse bees are foraging, and the rest are drawing comb since there is no brood for a week or so when the first eggs hatch. Because they can become nurse bees after being foragers for a while, a swarm will have a number of bees re-orienting after the new bees start to emerge in about three weeks after they are hived as the bees that started out foraging, switched back to being nurse or wax making bees, and then again became foragers go out of the hive again.

Most hives have bees doing orientation flights at the same time every day, so if you find out what time that is (usually mid to late afternoon, for whatever reason), you can check on how the hive is doing by the number of new foragers doing orientation flights every day. Mine, sadly, seem to orient at about 3 pm, so I'm only around to see it on weekends. My neighbor, who retired last year, spends a lot of time watching them.

Peter


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## JohnBeeMan (Feb 24, 2004)

If making splits and moving nurse bees they will not tend to return to home location. This indicates that nurse bees are house bees and do not do orientation flights until they transition to forgers bees. IMO


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## PatBeek (Jan 13, 2012)

psfred said:


> I think (but am not totally sure) that they do not orient until they become foragers. Nurse bees do not leave the hive, and I don't think they orient and then return inside.
> 
> Bees can change roles as needed, though. I got a kick out of watching my captured swarm orient after I opened up the hive, quite a show (for both of them, actually). With a swarm, quite a few bees that would otherwise be nurse bees are foraging, and the rest are drawing comb since there is no brood for a week or so when the first eggs hatch. Because they can become nurse bees after being foragers for a while, a swarm will have a number of bees re-orienting after the new bees start to emerge in about three weeks after they are hived as the bees that started out foraging, switched back to being nurse or wax making bees, and then again became foragers go out of the hive again.
> 
> ...



EXCELLENT post.

I was wondering about all of this the past few days because I have a freshly cut-out small batch of bees who most assuredly are switching roles in order to get the new comb drawn, foraging, nursing, etc. If they didn't switch roles, there's no way such a small batch could possibly survive and eventually thrive (hopefully).

They had massive amounts of orientation flights soon after they were relocated to my backyard, but now the hive is working like a well-oiled-machine-of-veterans who just MAY eek it out. If my hive survives this initial small population, then the orientation flights won't be happening again for several weeks - after their first batch of brood emerges.

The 'bee math' is making me very nervous right now.


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## sammyjay (May 2, 2011)

I have seen light colored fuzzy bees flying around the entrance, who I assume are quite young. I've never payed too close attention to them, but I assume they were orienting.


Nathan


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## Joseph Clemens (Feb 12, 2005)

Apparently orientation flights, age of bees, and the ability to find home; vary among colonies. I recently hived the first EHB swarm I've seen in this vicinity in almost twenty years, about four weeks ago. They were filling three 5-frame medium depth nuc boxes (stacked). The bottom two boxes were almost entirely brood and most of the frames in the bottom box and many of the frames in the middle box had begun to emerge and were well underway with that evolution. So, I took a few frames of honey and a couple of frames with newly emerged/emerging brood and placed a set in each of two new nucs, in unique alternate locations, then waited overnight. The next morning one was almost empty, but the other was well populated. The weaker one I gave an additional frame of emerging brood/nurse bees from an entirely different colony. I had several newly emerged daughter queens from their same mother (so these queens were their sisters). I released one virgin into each colony as I was making them up, they appeared well accepted, and were still there this morning (several days later).

It is curious that the one nuc had become so weakly populated, I had repeatedly given them multiple shakes of nurse bees as I was making them up from their parent hive - theoretically they should have been even more populous than the other newly stocked nuc. I wonder where so many young bees disappeared to, did they join a nearby nuc or somehow find their way home?


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## KQ6AR (May 13, 2008)

I'm guessing two weeks old or less. Since bees don't go to the bathroom in the hive, I think its well before foraging age.
Queens are flying about 2 weeks after emerging.


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## thenance007 (May 25, 2011)

I have to say I am amazed that so far nobody who posted really seems to know for sure. If I'm not mistaken, overwintering bees don't have to go outside to the bathroom for at least a month; if that's the case, the young bees could be 3 weeks old before they go out. I know when I dropped a frame of nurse bees on the ground, they all crawled up and into the nuc I placed on the ground, none flew. Anyone know definitively? Inquiring minds want to know!


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## thenance007 (May 25, 2011)

OK, I finally found the answer in "The Complete Idiot's Guide To Beekeeping: "The bees start to fly and orient themselves as early as 4 days after emerging (while they are still cleaning cells). . ."


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