All living things need water, and insects are no exception. They get most of the water they need from what they eat (e.g. nectar, vegetation), from dew, or from raindrops on leaves, but to make sure they have plenty, I put out drinking bowls for them between March and November. I regularly top up the bowls with water from my water butt, especially during spells of hot dry weather (not that we get many of those in Cumbria, but anyway…).
An important thing to bear in mind is that bees and many other insects can’t swim and can’t take off from the surface of water, so can run the risk of drowning if they drink from a large body of water (large in relation to their body size, I mean). Once in the early summer of 2024, after some heavy rain overnight, water had partly filled an empty plant pot I’d left out in my yard, and I saw a bee in it. Horrors! She wasn’t moving, and for a few awful moments I thought she’d drowned. I gently scooped her out with my index finger, and popped her onto a nearby allium (‘pop her onto an allium’ is my usual solution if I find a bee who appears to be in trouble). Thankfully, as soon as she was out of the water she started moving again, and spent several minutes carefully drying herself off with her legs and by rubbing herself over the flowers. I took the vid above of her drying her bottom with her back legs. She zoomed away moments after the end of the vid, evidently none the worse for her soaking. Thank goodness I saw her there in time, and I removed the plant pot so this didn’t happen again.
Below: you can see in this pic how wet she was.
To ensure that insects have access to safe drinking water if they need it, I fill shallow bowls and dishes with small stones, then top up the bowls with water. In this way, insects can perch either on the rim of the dish or on one of the stones, and drink safely. If you already have a bird bath or a pond, you could use those too - just put a few stones in the bath for insects to land on, or have some kind of plant, like waterlilies, that float on the surface of the water in the pond.
Below, wasps using my drinking bowls in September 2024.
The pics below were taken in late September 2024, and show a wasp carefully drying off his/her antennae and head with his/her front legs after drinking.
Below, a grasshopper also found the drinking bowls on 6 September. Not sure if he/she was actually thirsty and having a drink or was just having a nice rest there. I took a second pic with my fingers in it, to give a sense of the grasshopper’s size. Tiny it was not!
Anyway, just a little something to think about for when the weather finally starts getting warmer and our beloved insects start appearing again! If and when we have a spell of sunny dry weather this spring or summer, insects may well appreciate you providing water for them.
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