![]() In all seriousness, it allows scientists to pick bees up to study them without harming them. To safely pick up a live bee, scientists use a special device. “No one has come close to matching Sladen’s knowledge of the nesting habits of bumblebees.” 11. “Species that are today rare or extinct in Britain, such as the short-haired bumblebee, were familiar to Sladen, and his descriptions of the nests of such species remain pretty much all that we know,” Goulson writes. He published his first book about the bee at the age of 16, in 1892, solidifying himself as the world expert. Most of what we know about bumblebee nests comes from an entomologist who died in 1912.įrederick William Lambart Sladen was the first scientist to devote his research completely to bumblebees. However, male bumblebees don’t have a stinger at all, and female bumblebees aren’t very aggressive, so unless you go barging into their nest, you’re likely safe. The worker bee’s sisters carry more of her genes than her children would, so she leaves that whole childbirth thing to her mother. That’s why it makes sense for the majority of bees in the nest to help raise the queen’s offspring, rather than running off to start their own nests. But she’s only 50 percent related to her children, who get half their genes from their father and half from her. Bees have complicated family trees.īecause bee sisters receive exactly the same genes from their fathers, but only share around 50 percent of genes from their mother’s side, a female bumblebee is 75 percent related to her sisters. To have daughters-who make up the entirety of a bee workforce-a queen bee fertilizes her eggs with sperm she’s been storing since the previous summer. To produce a son, a queen bee merely has to lay an unfertilized egg. Male bumblebees have only one chromosome, and no father. Queen bees control the genetics of their offspring. By the end of the summer, when she’s a little over a year old, the queen and all her worker bees die, to be replaced by her daughters. Sperm stored up from mating the previous summer survives in her ovaries, ready to fertilize her eggs once she finally finds a nesting place. Only the fat queen bee survives winter hibernation, and she’s left to create a colony by herself. Bee sperm lives for months inside the queen bee. For context, there are around 25,000 known species of bee, though there are likely more that have yet to be discovered. They have a maximum of 300 to 400 worker bees, compared to the tens of thousands found in a honeybee or wasp nest. Bumblebee nests are much smaller than those of other species. “A bumblebee with a full stomach is only ever about 40 minutes from starvation,” as Goulson puts it. Bees have to eat a ton.īumblebees have extremely fast metabolisms, so they have to eat almost continuously. That’s a similar RPM to some motorcycle engines. A bumblebee flaps its wings 200 times per second. Its queens are described as looking like flying mice. The world’s largest bumblebee is the Bombus dahlbomii of South America. Dave Goulson, a scientist who founded a conservation trust to support bumblebee populations, has spent his career researching the habits and mannerisms of the humble bumblebee, a life he chronicles in his book about the bug, A Sting in the Tale: My Adventures with Bumblebees. Here are 15 compact facts we learned about bumblebees from Goulson’s adventures in bee research. ![]() They’re also very hard to study, as are most animals that are too small to tag and can fly away at any moment. Bumblebees-those fat, fuzzy fliers-are fascinating creatures. ![]()
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