40 Fun Facts About Bumblebees

According to a famous 20th-century myth, the laws of aerodynamics prove that a bumblebee should be unable to do what?

Fly at all, says the myth, which grew from rough sums that left out how air swirls over a beating wing. Real bumblebee wings stir up a vortex on every stroke that gives several times the lift.

Which wizard created by J. K. Rowling, imagined as always humming, has a surname that is an old word for bumblebee?

Albus Dumbledore carries a dialect name for the bumblebee, chosen because the headmaster loves music. J. R. R. Tolkien used the same old word for the insect in his poem Errantry.

Why can a female bumblebee sting again and again, when a honeybee worker usually dies after stinging a person?

Its stinger lacks barbs, so it slides out cleanly instead of tearing free like a honeybee's. Bumblebees are rarely aggressive and mostly sting only to defend the nest.

Which Russian composer wrote the frantic orchestral interlude Flight of the Bumblebee for his opera about Tsar Saltan?

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov wrote it for a scene in which a magic swan turns a prince into an insect so he can fly to his father. Its nearly unbroken runs of rapid notes make it a showpiece for virtuosos.

Cuckoo bumblebees are named for which habit that they share with the bird?

Laying eggs in others' nests is the whole strategy: the female invades a colony, kills or subdues its queen and has the workers raise her young. Cuckoo bumblebees cannot even collect pollen.

Bumblebee colonies are sold mainly to pollinate which greenhouse crop, a job once done by hand with vibrating tools?

Tomatoes shed pollen only when the flower is shaken, which a bumblebee does with its flight muscles. Rearing colonies for growers took off in 1987 and has become a worldwide trade.

In temperate climates, what happens to a bumblebee colony's workers and males when the cold weather of autumn arrives?

They all die off, and the old queen with them, so a nest lasts just one season. Only the newly mated young queens live on, sitting out the winter alone underground.

Which kind of field on a flower can a bumblebee sense, revealing whether another bee has visited recently?

Electric charge builds on flowers from the atmosphere and takes a while to leak away, so a bumblebee can tell which blooms were just visited. The bees can also sense how warm a flower is.

In a famous experiment, bumblebees learned to reach a sugar reward by doing what, a trick nest-mates then copied?

Pulling a string was the task, and untrained bumblebees that watched a skilled one did far better than those left to work it out alone. Such new skills can then spread through a whole colony.

Which children's author put a bumblebee called Babbitty Bumble in her 1910 book The Tale of Mrs. Tittlemouse?

Beatrix Potter made Babbitty Bumble one of the uninvited guests that the house-proud Mrs. Tittlemouse cannot shift. The messiest visitor is Mr. Jackson, a toothless toad who rummages for honey.

All of the more than 250 bumblebee species belong to which single genus?

Bombus dates from 1802 and has no living relatives in its tribe: every other member is known only from fossils. Apis is the honeybee genus, and Xylocopa holds the carpenter bees.

Which naturalist called bumblebees humble-bees throughout his 1859 book, using the standard English name of the time?

Charles Darwin wrote of humble-bees in On the Origin of Species, stressing how much certain wildflowers depend on their visits. The name bumblebee only took over during the 20th century.

What is the technique called when a bumblebee grips a flower and vibrates its flight muscles to shake pollen loose?

Buzz pollination, also known as sonication, is beyond honeybees, which cannot do it at all. Blueberries, potatoes and aubergines all give up their pollen more readily to a vibrating bee.

Bumblebees belong to the insect order Hymenoptera, along with wasps, sawflies and which other famous colony-builders?

Ants share the order with bees and wasps, while termites, for all their similar colonies, are not close relatives and are really highly derived cockroaches.

Which harmless two-winged insects often fool predators and gardeners alike by copying a bumblebee's furry, banded look?

Hoverflies carry no sting, yet predators that have learned to avoid bumblebees tend to leave the lookalikes alone too. Bee flies and some robber flies wear the same disguise.

Bumblebees live in Africa only north of the Sahara; which other inhabited continent's mainland has none at all?

Australia has none on its mainland, though buff-tailed bumblebees descended from New Zealand's imported stock reached Tasmania in 1992 and spread there.

Which burrowing European mammal is known to dig up whole bumblebee nests and eat them, adult bees included?

Badgers dig up the nest and eat it whole, wax, grubs and adults together. Crab spiders take a subtler approach, lying camouflaged on flowers to ambush visiting bumblebees.

Which famous honeybee behaviour for telling nest-mates where food lies is completely absent in bumblebees?

The waggle dance has no bumblebee version: a forager back from a good trip simply runs excitedly around the nest for several minutes, then heads out again.

A honeybee hive can hold about 50,000 bees; roughly how many bumblebees live in a typical nest?

50 to 400 is the usual range, though nests as small as 20 and as large as 1,700 have been recorded. The wax cells sit in an untidy cluster, not in neat hexagonal comb.

Which muscle action lets a bumblebee heat its thorax to about 30 °C before takeoff on a cold, sunless morning?

Shivering warms the flight muscles to working temperature in about five minutes when the air is 13 °C. It lets bumblebees forage on chilly days that keep honeybees at home.

The world's largest bumblebee, a ginger giant nicknamed the flying mouse, is native to which region of South America?

Patagonia and the cool forests of southern Chile and Argentina are home to this bee, whose queens reach 40 mm. It has declined since European bumblebees were brought in as commercial pollinators.

Which bumblebee, once found from the Dakotas to Georgia, was the first bee in the continental US listed as endangered?

Rusty patched bumblebees joined the US endangered list in January 2017, a year after seven yellow-faced bees from Hawaii. Workers wear the small rust-coloured patch of hair that gives the name.

Bumblebees were shipped to New Zealand in the 1880s to pollinate which fodder crop that local insects could not?

Red clover set no seed in New Zealand, so seed was imported every year until 93 surviving queens, landed in 1885 and 1886, multiplied. Four British species were brought over for the job.

Which ready-made shelter do many bumblebee queens take over in spring to found a nest, instead of digging their own?

Old rodent burrows offer shelter away from direct sunlight, which could overheat the brood. Other species nest above ground, in thick grass or in holes in trees.

What is the smooth, hair-fringed hollow on a female bumblebee's hind leg, used for carrying food home, commonly called?

Pollen basket loads can hold as many as a million grains, groomed off the body hairs and packed down. Males and cuckoo bumblebees have no baskets at all.

What do nectar-robbing bumblebees do to reach the sweet reward in a deep flower without pollinating it?

Bite a hole in its base and the nectar can be drunk from outside, with no pollen picked up or delivered. Short-tongued species do the biting, and other insects then reuse the holes.

Where does a bumblebee normally keep its long, hairy tongue when it is resting or flying?

Folded under its head, the tongue stays out of the way until the bee lands and extends it to lap up nectar. The garden bumblebee's is so long that it often flies with it already stretched out.

The tree bumblebee, which reached Britain from mainland Europe in 2001, often nests in which garden fixture?

Bird boxes suit a species that prefers to nest above ground. The tree bumblebee was first seen in Britain near the Wiltshire village of Landford and has spread widely since.

Arctic bumblebees live as far north as Ellesmere Island, which lies beside Greenland and belongs to which country?

Canada's Ellesmere Island marks the northern limit of social insect life, where bumblebees cope with some of the shortest flowering seasons on Earth.

Which American poet's father, the entomologist Otto, wrote the 1934 study Bumblebees and Their Ways?

Sylvia Plath turned her father's subject into a group of bee poems written late in 1962. Otto Plath taught biology and German at Boston University.

Which American essayist, a leading Transcendentalist, wrote the poem The Humble-Bee?

Ralph Waldo Emerson was not the only New England poet drawn to the insect: Emily Dickinson's 1881 bumblebee poem went out in a letter said to have enclosed a dead bee.

After New Zealand stock failed, which country supplied the short-haired bumblebees reintroduced to England at Dungeness?

Sweden's Skåne province provided the queens after DNA tests showed the New Zealand bees lacked genetic diversity. By summer 2013, workers seen near the release site proved nests had been founded.

Franklin's bumblebee, feared extinct, lived only in a small patch of Oregon and which neighbouring state?

Oregon and California share the 190-by-70-mile patch that was this bee's entire world. Its numbers fell drastically after 1998, and none has been found since 2006.

Which class of pesticides, including imidacloprid, is known to shrink bumblebee colonies and impair the bees' brains?

Neonicotinoids at field-realistic doses cut the production of new queens by 85% in one study of buff-tailed bumblebees. Affected foragers also took longer to learn how to handle flowers.

Which Asian country classes the buff-tailed bumblebee, a greenhouse import, as an invasive alien species?

Japan found that escaped buff-tailed bumblebees overlap heavily with native bees for flowers and nest sites. Growers there and in China have turned increasingly to a local species instead.

What is the soft coat of long, branched hairs that gives a bumblebee its fuzzy look and feel called?

Pile works as insulation, and bumblebees from cold climates grow it longer and thicker than their tropical relatives do.

Which British biologist, author of A Sting in the Tale, founded the Bumblebee Conservation Trust in 2006?

Dave Goulson started the charity with a lottery grant of £49,900. His book links Britain's bumblebee losses to the push for intensive farming that began in the Second World War.

The world's first bumblebee sanctuary opened in 2008 at Vane Farm, on a national nature reserve in which country?

Scotland's Loch Leven reserve hosts the sanctuary, and the country is also home to the Bumblebee Conservation Trust's main office, at the University of Stirling.

In a bumblebee nest, an egg that the queen leaves unfertilised develops into which kind of bee?

A male bumblebee has a mother but no father, growing from an egg with a single set of chromosomes. Workers can lay such eggs too, though nearly all of theirs get eaten by nest-mates.

Unlike honeybees, which hoard honey for winter, roughly how much food does a bumblebee colony keep in store?

A few days' worth is all a nest holds, which leaves bumblebees far more exposed to food shortages. It is also why nobody keeps them for honey.