Gone with the wind: effects of wind on honey bee visit rate and foraging behaviour

Wind is an important yet understudied environmental influence on foraging behaviour. We investigated the direct and indirect effects of wind on foraging worker honey bees, Apis mellifera. Bees were trained to an array of artificial flowers providing nectar rewards in a location sheltered from natural wind. To examine the direct effect, fans produced four different wind speeds between 0 and 3 m/s at three different flower spacings: 5 cm (flowers...