The Bumble Bee
Duncan Bosomworth, NPTA Technical Manager
As winter now hopefully enters its final stage, and god forbid it stops raining every day you may be thinking about the forthcoming calls coming in from your customers and the public.
With the occasional warm and sunny day bringing a flurry of insect activity into our lives we need to be thinking of what to expect as the days progress to spring and summer.
Queen bumble bees (genus Bombus) are a good sign that the weather is on the change as the first flowers of spring provide the bees with fresh nectar and pollen to collect for the new colony after they emerge from diapause.
Last year I saw the last queen bumble bee on Christmas Eve which was very bizarre as they’re normally over-wintering by this time. It was pretty mild which probably accounts for the late activity, if I remember correctly wasps were still about in late October/November too.
The queen bumble bee’s first flights out will be to feed and locate a suitable nesting site; this could be anything from an old rodent burrow to a void behind a soffit board in the eaves of a building.
I normally get queens scouting around in the garden and end up getting stuck down the hole our whirligig washing line sits in. The frustrated buzzing echoing around the garden is my prompt to poke a stick down the hole so she can climb out. (we are not always the crazed killers that people think we are!)
With wax produced from glands on her abdomen she creates several spheres to store pollen and nectar, then she starts laying her eggs.
Once hatched the larvae grow and are fed by the queen until pupation occurs and the new female workers take over providing food for the whole colony. The queen continues laying eggs to build the colony with the potential of creating up to 400 workers dependant on species.
The eggs that are produced by her will be either fertilised (resulting in female worker bees) or unfertilised (resulting in males / drones).
Drones appear from nests later in the year as do the new queens, the latter being dependant on the quantity, timing and other social factors coming into effect with the feeding of larvae which would otherwise develop into worker bees, the newly emerging queens will end up mating with drone/male bees.
The result will be the next generation of queen bumblebees that will over-winter ready for next year’s colonies, sadly the male bees will die after mating.
Not a pest species by any stretch of the imagination and not protected either, they have the ability to sting but rarely do as they are not aggressive creatures.
