The concrete of bored piles and diaphragm walls is often placed via tremie pipe to minimize segregation and mixing with bentonite suspension. The design and performance of self-compacting concrete often needs to meet the competing requirements for workability and stability, i.e. resistance against segregation and bleeding. Excessive bleeding in fresh concrete may give rise to channels and cavities impairing the quality of deep foundations. This paper summarizes our works on the bleeding of fresh concrete in the past decade. These works include the filtration test for bleeding propensity, the early strength of fresh concrete in a large shear box, the in-situ stress state in bored piles during and after placement and the centrifuge tests on model piles of fresh concrete. Finally, a mathematical model for the bleeding in deep foundation is established, which allows a solution in form of solitary waves. The solution offers a convincing explanation for bleeding mechanism. Some field tests are carried out on a bored pile with a diameter of one meter and a length of 5 meters. The test results are used to validate our mathematical model.