Bumblebee

Fascinating facts about the Bumblebee

• Underground nests hide beneath mouse burrows, where a single Bombus terrestris queen builds a comb-like chamber. Each colony typically produces 300 to 400 workers that labor within a few hundred metres of the entrance. This compact, hidden architecture lets the species thrive in gardens, farms and even greenhouse roofs, boosting pollination where humans plant crops.
• One queen survives winter, then starts a new colony by laying a small batch of diploid eggs in spring. The queen measures 20-22 mm, while workers range 11-17 mm, and the nest grows to about 300-400 bees before a predictable 30-day conflict forces the queen out. Understanding this cycle helps growers time greenhouse pollination for maximum yield.
• Workers vary in size like thumb, with thorax lengths from 2.3 mm up to 6.9 mm and body masses spanning 68 mg to 754 mg. This size diversity lets the colony assign tasks, larger workers tackle defence, smaller ones specialize in delicate flower foraging, illustrating how physical variation fuels efficient teamwork in social insects.
• Males plug queens' tracts for days, delivering a sticky secretion that blocks further mating for several days after a single copulation. Because Bombus terrestris queens are monogamous, this plug secures the male's paternity and limits genetic mixing, shaping colony genetics and influencing how workers relate to their half-sisters.
• Colonies can become male-biased, up to four males for each queen, with overall sex ratios recorded at 1 female to 4 males in some populations. This skew reflects the tug-of-war between queen-controlled 1:1 ratios and worker-favoured 3:1 ratios, revealing how conflict over reproduction drives bumblebee social evolution.

Sources

Every fact above was checked against these pages, and kept only where one of them states it.

• Wikipedia

At a glance

About the Bumblebee

The Buff-tailed Bumblebee (Bombus terrestris) is the most familiar of the world's 250-plus bumblebee species, a stocky, densely furred insect in black and yellow with a distinctive pale tail, found across Europe from the Mediterranean to Scandinavia and east into central Asia. Where most insects are cold, passive, and entirely dependent on ambient warmth, the bumblebee is something different: a thermoregulating animal that generates its own body heat, capable of flying on mornings that would ground every other pollinator. It is one of the first insects to emerge each spring and one of the last to disappear each autumn, and in that extended window it is irreplaceable. Unlike the honeybee, it masters buzz pollination, a targeted, frequency-precise vibration that releases pollen from flowers that respond to nothing else, making it essential to the production of tomatoes, blueberries, peppers, and dozens of other crops. Each colony is an annual creation: a single overwintered queen builds it from nothing in spring, and the entire structure, workers, drones, queen, dies by late autumn. The bumblebee's relatives are not so fortunate; dozens of species are in steep decline or already gone, casualties of a world that has traded meadows and wildflower margins for monoculture. The buff-tailed itself holds on, but its genus is a living barometer of what industrial agriculture has cost.

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