Do bees like music?

So I was chillin’ in the shed one afternoon listening to BB King's Bluesville while going over the instructions for my new Flow Hive when I began to wonder how bees respond to music.

I had been reading The Sacred Bee in Ancient Times and Folklore about how people used to sing to bees and play cymbals to summon them. Although bees don’t have ears, they hear vibrations through their antennae.

While searching online, I came across a playlist of bee-friendly music with buzzy baselines like So What and Uptown Funk that fall within the 250-500 Hz frequency range that bees might hear in the hive. Then I came across Layne Redmond’s Hymns from the Hive and Sacred Tools of the Bee Priestess: Sound Purification, which I suspect are outside of that frequency range, and decided to conduct an experiment. So I set up my little Bose speaker on a chair next to the pond and cranked it up just a bit.

With all that clanging and chiming, the bees beat a hasty retreat and one gave me a buzz on her way back to the pepper tree. The next day my bees were back busy at work on the pond, but the pepper tree bees were nowhere in sight. In fact, I haven’t seen them since.

—HoneyBower earns a commission from the sale of qualifying products.