It’s amazing how a pond livens things up in the garden.

A half whiskey barrel pond with a few plants, a solar fountain, and some mosquito fish makes an ideal water source for bees. If you already have a pond or pool in your yard for people to enjoy, a strategically placed whiskey barrel pond will keep the bees out of everybody’s way.

Stringy green algae (Claudophora spirogyra), otherwise known as pond scum — and not to be confused with the smooth jazz group Spyro Gyra — grows into a bubbling floating carpet that bees can easily land on. That, combined with a forest of dwarf horsetail makes an irresistably cool retreat on a hot day. Bees snack on algae and stick their long, straw-like tongues through the algae to fill their tanks with nutrient-rich pond water. Then they climb up the reeds and fly back to the hive.

Spirolina, a distant cousin of spirogyra, is a blue-green bacteria (Arthrospira platensis) with a nutritional profile that is similar to pollen. This is the same stuff the Aztecs made into energy bars for their long distance runners, and is being investigated as a nutritional supplement for bees.

Sometime around the middle of summer, my bees’ private oasis was discovered by bees from a wild colony that lives in a California pepper tree (schinus mole) a couple of doors away.

The first sign that a territorial battle was brewing was a minor skirmish on a horsetail reed. Then, one bee jumped on the back of another and held her down before throwing her off the algae pad.

Girl fight!

I couldn’t tell if my bees were defending their territory or being pushed around by the other bees.

These minor skirmishes soon escalated into a full-scale invasion by the bees from the pepper tree. Eventually, both sides settled into an uneasy truce.

I could tell who was who from the direction they flew away from the pond. The pepper tree bees were more aggressive than my Italian bees, and there was a difference in the air when they were around.

It was time to batten down the hatches!

So I was chillin’ in the shed one afternoon with a glass of wine and 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 do 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 Sacred Tools of the Bee Priestess: Sound Purification, which I suspect is outside of that frequency range, and I decided to conduct an experiment. I set up my little Bose speaker on a chair next to the pond and cranked it up just a bit.