Bees prefer country blossoms to city blooms.

• Position: Entomology

Hungry honey bees appear to favor flowers in agricultural areas over those in neighboring urban neighborhoods. The discovery has implications for urban beekeepers and challenges assumptions that farmland and honey bees are incompatible, say authors of a study appearing in the Journal of Urban Ecology.

The team positioned honey bee colonies in an apiary in a cemetery smack in the middle of where urban residential development transitions into farmland. They left the colonies to forage for nectar and pollen wherever they preferred.

The bees, studied from late summer to early fall, overwhelmingly went for the agricultural offerings instead of the assorted flowering plants in and around the urban neighborhoods nearby, relates entomologist and lead author Douglas Sponsler. Throughout the study, the honey bees' haul always favored plants from the agricultural area, and hit a high of 96% of the pollen collected at one point. "Honey bees didn't seem to care that much what the floral diversity was. What they wanted was large patches of their favorite stuff."

Goldenrod was particularly popular, the researchers found. The bees' agricultural foraging preference especially was pronounced at the end of the...