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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