Epona
Sonic: 1 Nov 2006 - 8 Jan 2022
This is your fault, don't say you didn't ask
It's a myth that bees will die if they sting you.
Only females have stingers, as they are an adaptation of the ovipositor, males can't sting.
Honey bees have barbed/hooked stingers and if they sting you and the stinger gets stuck in your skin, it can cause damage to the abdomen which may result in their death. This does tend to put them off stinging unless the really have to.
Bumble bees however have straight stingers, and can sting multiple times and fly away quite happily afterwards and go on with their lives. They tend not to though as they are very placid and generally will try to get away or give you a warning (the raised leg) to leave it alone. They just want to get on with their bumbling in peace.
Bumblies are buzz-pollinators, and some plants are adapted to hold onto their pollen - pollen is expensive to produce in terms of energy and nutrients required (and hence is a valuable food source to some species), and some plants have evolved to produce less pollen and be more frugal with releasing it until the right conditions come along - bumblies can sit on a flower and hold on to the anther with their legs, dislocate their wings from their wing muscles, then rapidly pulsate their wing muscles up to 200 times per second to shake pollen out of the anther onto their bodies.
Females have specially adapted rear legs with a spike on them which is called a pollen basket, once pollen is on their fur they will wipe it off with their front legs and deposit it in the pollen basket area. Males do not do this, so if you see one with the blobs of pollen on its rear legs, it is a female (either a queen or a worker), if pollen is all over its fur and no pollen baskets, then it is a male (the term drone is not used for Bumblies, that is specific to honey bee colonies).
Honey bees are a domesticated non-native species and although some people seem to think it's good for the environment to have honey bee hives, all they are really doing is intensive farming - one colony of honey bees requires 4 football pitches size of flowers to sustain it, and in areas where this sort of flower distribution and diversity are not available, having a honey bee hive without also providing an appropriate amount of forage for them is a threat to our native wild bees who cannot out compete domestic bees.
Bumble bees are only ever 40 minutes away from starvation, so having a window box with herbs or a pot with flowering herbs or lavender on a balcony or doorstep or patio can be a very valuable stop off point for bees who need to feed. It doesn't matter how high up in a tower block a balcony is, bumblies originally evolved in the Himalayas, they are adapted for cool climates and flying at high altitude and if there was a lavender plant on top of The Shard, they'd find it useful and visit it. Oh and while honeybees "dance" to tell others in their hive where good sources of food are, bumblies do not do this behaviour at all.
Some bumblies only have one colony cycle a year, others have 2. In the south of England, buff-tailed bumblies have started to have 3 cycles as our autumns have been getting milder. Increased periods of rain are a threat though, because they cannot forage in heavy rain and don't tend to store that much food.
Bumblies will nest in a variety of places depending upon species - carder bees prefer long tussocks of grass with patches of sphagnum moss, tree bumblies like old woodpecker or parakeet nests or other holes in trees, or unused tit boxes (quiet at the back!) with last year's bedding still in it, most other bumblies nest underground - they are not particularly good diggers but love old rodent tunnels or rabbit burrows. At this time of year, you mostly see newly out of hibernation bumble queens flying in a zig zag pattern close to the ground looking for potential nest sites (although the tree bumblies will be a bit higher up searching for holes in trees).
They forage as they go, and when they find a suitable spot they will build little cups in which to store the watery nectar they collect. Unlike honeybees, they don't produce honey and don't build complex cellular structures (and the reason we farm honeybees is because they do this and we can utilise the honey and wax easily, bumblies do not store as much food and their nests are messier).
The queen, who was mated shortly after hatching the previous autumn before going into hibernation for the winter will then go in and out of the nest collecting food, until she has enough to raise her first brood. Her first brood are all female workers - this is determined by pheromones produced by the queen, which she does instinctively depending upon pheromone signals received from bees around her, telling her the demographics of her colony, and also how much food is being brought back (males and new queens are expensive in terms of resources to produce and provide no food to the colony, so will only be produced when the colony is very successful) - if she's the only one there and food is low, she'll only produce female workers. (This seems odd to us, but it's worth bearing in mind that insects have been evolving for far far far longer than mammals, who are just a recent blip on planet Earth, and have developed some very complex reproductive and survival adaptations).
They will then go out and forage and bring back food - from this point the queen will spend the rest of her life in the nest, laying eggs.
Towards the end of the season if the nest is successful the queen will switch pheromone production and then some males will develop and hatch - but get this, they develop from unfertilised eggs, and are haploid - ie. they only have 1 set of chromosomes instead of in pairs, which would require 2 parents resulting in egg fertilisation.
Males once grown will then leave the nest, never to return - they go and feed themselves, and (most species, notably not tree bumble males, who will try to invade other tree bumblie nests to find queens) hang out on flowers waiting for a new queen to come and visit them on their flower for mating - their sole purpose in life is to fertilise a new queen's eggs after which they die, they don't live long and are only seen at the end of the colony cycle.
The existing queen will then again switch pheromones, and produce new queens, who when they are developed will leave the nest, find a male to mate, and if they are from the first colony cycle they will immediately go and find a new nest spot and start round 2, or if they are from the final cycle of the season and it is autumn, they will forage to build up fat stores and find a hole underground to hibernate for the winter.
Bees evolved from wasps (they are essentially vegetarian wasps), so although some people are "ugh, wasps" but "
bees", if it wasn't for wasps, bees wouldn't exist.I hope that is either a) interesting, or b) at the very least not too tedious
You did ask
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