Urban Bees

We have a scrappy lemon tree on our tiny 7th floor apartment balcony near downtown Houston.  Last fall, we harvested 6 lemons. This spring, we noticed that we had one honeybee visit our tree routinely.  These last few days of her visits, she brought 3 additional honeybees along with her.  The books we have read say that a foraging worker bee will return to the hive with information about the nectar and pollen that they have collected.  The bee will communicate to the others in the hive by using precise dance patterns; the "round dance" and the "waggle dance".  The round dance communicates that the food source is within 80 yards of the hive.  The vigor of the waggle dance and the number of times that it is repeated will communicate the direction in which the food source can be found.  After a couple of weeks of seeing our single honeybee, we counted 4 bees on the scrappy tree at one time.  We will keep you posted on our lemon harvest this fall. 


Our urban bee.