By KAREN MADORIN
Hays Post
You’d think a gal who’s celebrated 70 summers would know bumble and honey bees are very different creatures.
Both are bees but live entirely different lifestyles. Compare them to city and rural residents or people from Alaska and Florida. Until recently, I never considered their differences other than to note one was fuzzier and bigger.
Because we planted more flowers this year, scores more bumble bees zip through our airways, flitting from one blossom to another. Numbers increased enough we may need bee traffic control to prevent wrecks.
That observation awakened the one time four-year-old-me full of questions needing answers. What do they eat, where do they live, are they like honey bees only bigger, and so on. Once my curiosity fired up, I scoured one article after another to learn these unique creatures are very different from honey bees that share their territory.
Honey bees are smaller with lighter coloring. Often, over a thousand live year-round in above ground hives either man-made or bee-constructed and filled with complex hexagonal wax combs designed to store honey. This labor-intensive lifestyle ensures colonies survive winters to emerge each spring.
Workers and drones specialize in collecting pollen and nectar, organizing tidy hives and combs, and nurturing expanding populations. It can take seven or more honey bees to harvest nectar from one flower. To succeed, colonies must function as a fine-tuned organization.
Bumble bees, larger, fuzzier, and more intensely colored than honey bees operate with an entirely different mindset. Their colonies are much smaller than honey bees’. As few as 20 to possibly 400 share a hive. Drones and workers live only one season and die before winter. Only the queen survives 'til the next year so bumble bee hives exist for only one season.
The queen doesn’t over-winter at that site. She scouts a sheltered location where she hibernates and incubates fertilized eggs 'til emerging the following spring. She then establishes a new hive in either a log or tree cavity or in an abandoned animal hole in the ground, lays eggs, and collects enough pollen to get that first hatch started.
The initial emergents are all female and once mature, care for the following hatches which turn into drones and worker bees. Bumble bees make honey, but since they don’t live through the winter, they don’t store it. They produce enough to survive from week to week, tucking it in little wax pots stashed around comb-less, disorganized hives.
Only females sting, and unlike honey bees, they don’t lose their stinger after they use it so they can wreak havoc again.
Males have no stinger so outdoor-lovers who can identify carriers of XY chromosomes can relax when sizable, fuzzy, yellow and black dudes do a fly-by. No squealing or evasive tactics necessary.
Where it takes multiple honey bees to harvest pollen and nectar from a flower, bumble bees are more efficient. One latches onto a blossom’s anther and flaps its wings. The resulting vibration loosens pollen so the bee can harvest it, or it pollinates nearby blossoms. One researcher mentioned greenhouses utilize bumble bees to increase tomato production.
Some humans earn specialized degrees to learn everything possible about bumble bees. I prefer to watch them vibrating my flowers.
That said, I enjoyed the time I spent unearthing facts I should have known years ago.
Karen Madorin is a retired teacher, writer, photographer, outdoors lover, and sixth-generation Kansan.