When a person sees bees in an inconvenient location, the immediate thought may be to spray them with water. While this action temporarily forces the bees to the ground, it introduces a serious biological risk. Understanding the consequences requires looking closely at bee physiology and the context of the application. While water appears to “work” by grounding the bee, the resulting effects are rarely benign for the insect.
Immediate Physical and Behavioral Effects
The most immediate effect of spraying a bee with water is the dramatic increase in its body and wing mass, which instantly impairs flight mechanics. A bee’s ability to fly relies on its wings remaining dry and relatively lightweight, allowing for the rapid, high-frequency wingbeats necessary for lift and propulsion. When water droplets coat the bee’s body and wings, they add significant weight, making the delicate flight structures too heavy to overcome gravity.
This sudden weight gain causes the bee to become waterlogged, leading to a forced landing or disorientation. A wet bee cannot effectively control its direction or altitude, and its primary focus shifts from foraging or navigation to survival. The water also disrupts the smooth airflow over the wings, further reducing aerodynamic efficiency and making sustained flight impossible. This grounding effect is why the technique appears to successfully “get rid of” bees, but it is not a permanent deterrent.
The Biological Risk of Chilling and Hypothermia
Beyond the mechanical grounding, dousing a bee with water creates a substantial biological threat, primarily due to chilling and hypothermia. Bees are ectotherms, meaning they are unable to maintain a constant internal body temperature independent of their surroundings. To generate the necessary warmth for flight, they rely on endothermic heat production, essentially shivering their flight muscles to raise their thoracic temperature to around 35°C (95°F) or higher.
When water covers the bee’s body, the process of evaporative cooling begins, which rapidly draws heat away from the insect. This rapid temperature drop can quickly lead to a “chill coma,” or torpor, where the bee becomes immobilized and incapable of movement. While a torpid bee may survive for a limited time, it is highly vulnerable and cannot return to the hive or forage. If the ambient temperature is cool, the wet bee may lose heat faster than it can generate it, leading to a fatal hypothermia.
The loss of metabolic heat impairs the function of the bee’s flight muscles, which require a high temperature to contract effectively. If a bee is unable to warm up, it cannot fly, forage, or defend itself, even after the water evaporates. This prolonged state of incapacitation significantly decreases the bee’s chance of survival, making the use of water a potentially lethal intervention.
Context Matters: Swarm Management Versus Defensive Action
The consequences of spraying water depend heavily on the situation, differentiating between gentle swarm management and an aggressive defensive action. Beekeepers sometimes use a very fine mist of water, often mixed with sugar, on a newly settled swarm to encourage them to stay put. The fine mist temporarily grounds the bees and makes them focus on grooming and clustering, which can calm them and make them easier to capture and move into a new hive. This is a targeted, low-pressure application intended to briefly inhibit flight, not to soak or harm the insects.
Conversely, using a high-pressure stream of water on a defensive bee or a hive entrance is likely to be perceived as a direct attack, which can increase agitation. Bees defending their colony respond to sudden disturbances and the threat of damage, and a powerful spray of water can trigger the release of alarm pheromones. Once these pheromones are released, they recruit other bees to the perceived threat, potentially escalating a minor situation into a defensive response. In this scenario, the water does not deter the bees long-term and may instead provoke the reaction the person was trying to avoid.