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Hardyrod1974

Do trout eat bees?

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I'm reading Norman Maclean's "A River Runs Through It", excellent book by the way. Slightly different than the movies version.

Anyway, at one point he mentions that he comes across a dead beaver along side the stream and bees are swarming around it. At that point he selects a fly that somewhat resembles a bee and proceeds to catch some trout on it.

Has anyone here seen trout take a bee off the surface or fish with a fly that resembles a bee and caught trout with it?

 

Richard

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No trout here ... but Honey Bees and Bumble Bees will get hit from all the fish in my area. If there are flowers overhanging the water, it's the first color combo I tie on.

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I've caught trout on a McGinty wet fly before, but I doubt it's because the trout identified it as a bee. I have not seen a take on a bee either. I would place it way back in the group of terrestrials that would rarely make it to the water. But I would imagine that around hives, natural or man-made boxes, bees would quite often make it to the surface and would be eaten.

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Absolutely. Not a commonly used pattern, but like any other terrestrial, there are going to be times where they are readily available and trout will key in on them. There was a time on one of my local streams when beekeepers were resting their hives near the water, and the trout eagerly slammed any pattern that resembled a honey bee. Have seen plenty of opportunist takes of bees on various streams and even lakes. I would not advocate filling my boxes with bee patterns, but never hurts to have a few just in case you run into the right conditions.

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I doubt the trout identifies it as bee, it is about the size and shape as food and it moves on the water like food; gulp.

 

I used to know a bee keeper that to show off would eat bees; after watching him I'm pretty sure bees don't sting while being swallowed.

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Animals, especially primitive animals like fish, do not register pain like we do.

When I was a child, we had a Boxer named Candy. (I didn't name her, sisters did)

When the apple trees were dropping rotten apples, the bees would practically swarm the area, feeding on the juices.

Candy would jump around, catching and eating bees. You could see her react to the ones that stung her ... then go right back after another one.

We figured they were just "jalapenos" to her.

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I've caught a bunch of pan fish on bee flies, Nothing fancy, just a black and yellow cylinder with some hackle wrapped on it. I've seen trout and pan fish take floating bees off the surface.

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I have seen Trout eat both Honey Bees and Yellow Jackets and have caught Trout on Bee patterns. There is a particular small lake I fish that is next to a clover field and honey operation. A few Bees occasionally end up on the lake and get eaten. It's a meal of opportunity like an ant or beetle.

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I have fished Manzanita Lake in Lassen Park when there were lots of bees on the water. Considering the number of bees and the fact that many of them were creating a disturbance with their wings, I was surprised that I didn't see a single trout eat one of them. Manzanita is a crystal clear lake that used to have great hatches of midges, callibaetis, damsel flies and flying ants so maybe the fish were just preferring these insects over the bees. Still, when you see the bees disturbing the calm water and trout in the vicinity rising to other insects, I was convinced that the trout didn't care for them.

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Back when I used to keep the occasional trout, I would often examine the stomach contents of the first fish I caught. One day, in Ken Lockwood Gorge in NJ, I was getting very frustrated at not getting any interest from a pod of regular risers. When I finally did manage one, I opened its stomach to discover that it was packed with yellow jackets, some still alive. I switched to a McGinty and caught five or six more in very short order,

 

Yes, trout eat bees and wasps.

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Used to pound the C&R section of the Swift river in Ma. These fish get educated after being caught a few times.... well some of them do. Classic dry flies had a short season. I caught many trout on a variety of ants, crickets, inch worms and bumble bees. These trout would not look at a hackled dry.

 

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