Do Your Bees Need Boundaries? New Study Reveals Honey Bee Colonies Avoid Foraging Turf Wars
- Frank Jeanplong
- May 25, 2025
- 2 min read
This study will give you fresh insight if you're a New Zealand beekeeper managing multiple hives, or just wondering how your bees interact with your neighbor's apiary. Using over 8,000 decoded waggle dances, researchers found that honey bee colonies living side by side naturally partition their foraging zones - not across vast landscapes, but locally, on different flower patches nearby.
What This Means for You:
Forget the old fear that too many hives in one spot will lead to brutal competition. This research shows that bees from neighboring colonies aren’t all rushing to the same food source. Instead, they divvy up patches like good neighbors putting up invisible fences - possibly reducing stress and boosting foraging efficiency for everyone.
Top Takeaways for Kiwi Beekeepers:
Goodbye feeding frenzy fears: Bees from adjacent colonies rarely crowd the same patch. Local-scale foraging partitioning is the norm.
Hive crowding isn’t always bad: Even when placed close together (as little as two metres apart!), colonies still develop distinct foraging zones.
Smarter foraging = better colony health: By minimizing competition, bees likely optimize energy use and reduce stress, which is key to brood rearing and honey flow.
Waggle dance science is powerful: The study used advanced decoding of dance communications to map real-time foraging patterns. This isn’t theory - it’s based on what bees actually do.
Why it Matters in Aotearoa:
Whether you're in the Manuka hills of Northland or running urban hives in Hamilton, understanding how your bees forage in shared landscapes helps you manage resources, avoid unnecessary feeding, and make better placement decisions during flow season.
Final Buzz:
Bees know how to share the landscape better than we often give them credit for. This study is a reminder that nature often has built-in solutions to problems we assume need fixing.
Want to dive deeper? Check out the full paper: Ohlinger et al. (2025), “Good Fences Make Good Neighbors” in Ecology and Evolution.
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