do bees ever go back to the same colony?

Answer 1

Almost always.

For a small insect, bees have some surprising abilities.

Bees depend on the power of cooperation and large numbers for survival. If bees weren't able to return to the same hive, day after day, the colony would quickly disappear.

Bees may rarely get lost or caught in bad weather. Such a bee is doomed; but the queen lays enough eggs every day to replace aging, killed, or lost workers.

Bees have excellent vision(as far as insect vision goes....) They can use the position of the sun, various landmarks, and also smell to find their way home.

On the odd chance that the bee returned to a different, nearby hive by mistake, it would probably turn away because the strange hive "smelled wrong." Otherwise, "guard bees" at the entrance world drive off or kill the interloper.

A bee that finds a particularly rich source of nectar, (such as a blooming apple tree,) is even able to remember it's location, and direct other bees towards it. (When the bee returns to the hive, it performs a special "dance" that tells other bees the direction and distance to the food source....)

Bees are amazing, fascinating creatures, and you can write whole books about them without running out of material....

Hope that helps,
~W.O.M.B.A.T.

Answer 2

The natural plan of bee colonies is that the bees return to the same colony with the nectar and pollen they have collected.

Some researchers think that in the disorder called "colony collapse" that the bees can not find their way back to the hive. The colonies die out, but there aren't any dead bees around. It isn't like the hives where they have parasitic mites and they find dead bees all over. It's a big problem right now.

Answer 3

Bees most certainly do everything in their power to make it back to their own colony that they were born in.

In fact, honey bees are one of a few other types of insects that are considered to be social (some bees live on their own and not in colonies). By social I mean they actually live together in families where there is typically one queen (the mother of all of the bees, typically) and all the workers are the offspring of this queen and they are ALL female. The males of the bees are only around to mate with the queens. Worker bees do everything from caring for the young, cleaning up the nest, and foraging for food and they are perfectly "happy" doing this. So in a sense, bees of a colony are like a tight knit family and they prefer to keep it that way. In fact, each colony nest has its own unique scent that distinguishes it from other colonies.
If you put two bees from two different colonies together, they will most likely fight...to the death! This also happens with most ants and termites. This is because no bee wants to take in a complete stranger into their home, where only their family belong (its like the bees don't want other bees that aren't family to mooch off of them). So if you are a bee, you really don't want to go into a different colony than your own because you are likely to wind up dead...or if you're lucky, driven out.

Answer 4

Of course they do. That's why they show them doing that "dance". They go out and when they find a place where to get pollen they go back to the colony and thru their dance they give them "directions" to the source of pollen.