Here you can find the study I refer to in this cartoon. No additional comment is needed here, I believe 😉
This post was published on Instagram in cooperation with The Pollinator Academy. I’m happy to be involved in this initiative. If you are interested to learn about pollinators, in particular bees, hoverflies and butterflies, and recognizing them, check out the PA website!
Have you ever seen a bumblebee lift its leg as if to say hello or give you a high five? The bee looks as though she wants to be friends with you. In reality, however, it’s the opposite.
In bee language, raising a leg is a sign of discontent. This message can be directed towards humans or other insects. It’s a warning not to approach any closer if you don’t want to get stung. However, in the case of males, it’s only a bluff as they don’t possess a stinger.
Shortly after emerging from the nest and mating, young bumblebee queens start looking for a place to hibernate. Typically, a female will dig a hibernaculum in the ground — a relatively short tunnel with a small chamber at the end. I was surprised to read that when a digging female encounters an obstacle in her way, like a pebble, she doesn’t try to bypass it but leaves the burrow and starts a new one. What could be the adaptive significance of this? Or is there none? If you know, please tell me!
I just saw that my fanpage on Facebook has exceeded 1,000 followers – thank you!
The honeybee is unimpressed. Their colonies can have about 50,000 workers. By comparison, bumblebee colonies range from several dozen to around 500 individuals. But this fanpage is about non-honeybees, so we don’t care about the honeybee’s opinion.
…and the most cat-like bumblebee is the brown-banded carder bee! It just struck me how similar they are. Bombus humilis is called “trzmiel zmienny” in Polish, which means “the variable bumblebee”. It’s really accurate name. This species can come in various colour forms, some of them so dissimilar that you could think they are different species. My favourite form is the one I nicknamed ‘calico’ on the cartoon below.
PS I set up an account on BuyCoffee. If you want to support my work and help me buy more books about bees, I’ll be very thankful. And, as always, I’m thankful for all your shares and likes on social media, and positive comments and messages!
In #beetober it will be (hitch)hike.
Surely you saw bumblebees with small brownish “dots” in their hair. You might think that they are varroa but they’re not. Varroa is a parasite which attacks presently only honeybees. Those bumblebee “dots” are mites, too, but they don’t suck their haemolymph or do any harm – in this life stage they are just hitchhiking to the bumblebee nest. Inside a bumblebee colony, they often are harmless or even beneficial, eating debris or hunting for harmful mite species. So, you don’t need to worry about a bumblebee carrying mites on her.
I decided to take part in #inkober2024 and to make it a #beetober on my blog. The first drawing is a bit cheated, as I’m in a train and have only a gel pen with me, so it’s not exactly ink drawing.
Topic of day 1 is: backpack. What can it have in common with bees? Some do carry tiny backpacks, thanks to the curious scientists who want to know where they are going! Larger species, like honeybee or bumblebees, can be equipped with little transponders which allow to track their movements with the radar. Scientists can follow each individual bee and see where and when it forages. Crazy, isn’t it? 🙂
f you want to see how bee backpacks look in real life, check this link: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/237085202_Unravelling_the_mechanisms_of_trapline_foraging_in_bees
Young bumblebee queens spend a few days feeding and looking for a male to mate. Then, they don’t wait for winter to come but dig a hibernaculum and go to sleep – sometimes as early as June!
Bumblebees are animals of colder climates than most bees, and climate change can affect them negatively in various ways. One of dangers are heatwaves. They can not only simply kill the individuals but also impair their memory.
Flowers are the main (and in most cases, the only) source of food for bees. But it’s not their only role in bees’ lifes. They can have also a medicinal value, helping bees to get rid of various pathogens. One of examples is pollen of sunflowers. It helps bumblebees fight the infection by Crithidia bombi, their protozoan pathogen. The mechanism of this beneficial effect was unclear, as scientists could not identify any chemicals present in sunflower pollen which would kill the pathogens. It turned out that there might be none… but the pollen works like a laxative, cleaning the digestive tract from the pathogen’s spores.
Here you can read about the study: Adler, L. S., Fowler, A. E., Malfi, R. L., Anderson, P. R., Coppinger, L. M., Deneen, P. M., … & Stevenson, P. C. (2020). Assessing chemical mechanisms underlying the effects of sunflower pollen on a gut pathogen in bumble bees. Journal of chemical ecology, 46, 649-658.
The spring is there (at least in the area where I live!) and each day we can see more and more bees. One of the first thoughts of the freshly emerging males is… mating. They are looking for the virgin and receptive females of their species, alert to their pheromones and to their appearing on the horizon. However, sometimes they make spectacularly misdirected attempt of courtship. They can assault females of other bee species, male bees, and even insects other than bees.
There is an interesting project on iNaturalist.org named “Interspecies insect mating” where you can find a few bee observations. I recommend adding your own, if you are lucky to witness such situation!
In most bee species, there is not much size variation within one sex, and body size is often useful character in the process of species identification. Bumblebees belong to the exceptions from this rule. In females, there is huge size variation not only within a species but even within a single family. You can see this clearly in the spring – the first ones to emerge are queens which are big. Then very small wokers appear – these are the first brood reared by the queen herself. Then, the next “generations” of workers consist of both big and small ones, and the difference can be even tenfold!
In this paper, the effect of interaction between size of a bumblebee and size of a flower was studied. It turned out that there is not much effect of the sizes of the interacting parties on effectiveness of pollination. It is a good news because it allows us to assume that these interactions are resilient to size changes which might be a result of various environmental factors, like climate change. In the warmer temperatures, organisms tend to get smaller but not every species and population must change their size at the same pace.
Non-honey bees 