Bumblebees
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40 free Bumblebees trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Bumblebees are the big, furry, good-natured bees of gardens and meadows, and they are stranger than they look. They work in weather that grounds other pollinators, sense things about a flower that people cannot, and pick up new tricks by watching one another. This quiz covers the whole life of the colony: how a nest starts in spring, who does what inside it, what the bees eat and what eats them. It also takes in the cuckoo species that cheat the system, the native North American and British bumblebees now in trouble, and the insect's long run in poems, children's books and classical music. It suits gardeners, nature lovers, students and anyone setting a wildlife round for a quiz night. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you finish knowing more than when you started.
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Q 01According to a famous 20th-century myth, the laws of aerodynamics prove that a bumblebee should be unable to do what?
Fly at all
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.
Q 02Which wizard created by J. K. Rowling, imagined as always humming, has a surname that is an old word for bumblebee?
Albus Dumbledore
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.
Q 03Why can a female bumblebee sting again and again, when a honeybee worker usually dies after stinging a person?
Its stinger lacks barbs
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.
Q 04Which Russian composer wrote the frantic orchestral interlude Flight of the Bumblebee for his opera about Tsar Saltan?
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov
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.
Q 05Cuckoo bumblebees are named for which habit that they share with the bird?
Laying eggs in others' nests
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.
Q 06Bumblebee colonies are sold mainly to pollinate which greenhouse crop, a job once done by hand with vibrating tools?
Tomatoes
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.
Q 07In temperate climates, what happens to a bumblebee colony's workers and males when the cold weather of autumn arrives?
They all die off
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.
Q 08Which kind of field on a flower can a bumblebee sense, revealing whether another bee has visited recently?
Electric
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.
Q 09In a famous experiment, bumblebees learned to reach a sugar reward by doing what, a trick nest-mates then copied?
Pulling a string
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.
Q 10Which children's author put a bumblebee called Babbitty Bumble in her 1910 book The Tale of Mrs. Tittlemouse?
Beatrix Potter
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.
Q 11All of the more than 250 bumblebee species belong to which single genus?
Bombus
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.
Q 12Which naturalist called bumblebees humble-bees throughout his 1859 book, using the standard English name of the time?
Charles Darwin
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.
Q 13What is the technique called when a bumblebee grips a flower and vibrates its flight muscles to shake pollen loose?
Buzz pollination
Q 21The world's largest bumblebee, a ginger giant nicknamed the flying mouse, is native to which region of South America?
Patagonia
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.
Q 22Which bumblebee, once found from the Dakotas to Georgia, was the first bee in the continental US listed as endangered?
Rusty patched
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.
Q 23Bumblebees were shipped to New Zealand in the 1880s to pollinate which fodder crop that local insects could not?
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.
Q 14Bumblebees belong to the insect order Hymenoptera, along with wasps, sawflies and which other famous colony-builders?
Ants
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.
Q 15Which harmless two-winged insects often fool predators and gardeners alike by copying a bumblebee's furry, banded look?
Hoverflies
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.
Q 16Bumblebees live in Africa only north of the Sahara; which other inhabited continent's mainland has none at all?
Australia
Australia has none on its mainland, though buff-tailed bumblebees descended from New Zealand's imported stock reached Tasmania in 1992 and spread there.
Q 17Which burrowing European mammal is known to dig up whole bumblebee nests and eat them, adult bees included?
Badger
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.
Q 18Which famous honeybee behaviour for telling nest-mates where food lies is completely absent in bumblebees?
The waggle dance
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.
Q 19A honeybee hive can hold about 50,000 bees; roughly how many bumblebees live in a typical nest?
50 to 400
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.
Q 20Which muscle action lets a bumblebee heat its thorax to about 30 °C before takeoff on a cold, sunless morning?
Shivering
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.
Red clover
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.
Q 24Which ready-made shelter do many bumblebee queens take over in spring to found a nest, instead of digging their own?
Old rodent burrows
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.
Q 25What is the smooth, hair-fringed hollow on a female bumblebee's hind leg, used for carrying food home, commonly called?
Pollen basket
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.
Q 26What do nectar-robbing bumblebees do to reach the sweet reward in a deep flower without pollinating it?
Bite a hole in its base
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.
Q 27Where does a bumblebee normally keep its long, hairy tongue when it is resting or flying?
Folded under its head
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.
Q 28The tree bumblebee, which reached Britain from mainland Europe in 2001, often nests in which garden fixture?
Bird boxes
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.
Q 29Arctic bumblebees live as far north as Ellesmere Island, which lies beside Greenland and belongs to which country?
Canada
Canada's Ellesmere Island marks the northern limit of social insect life, where bumblebees cope with some of the shortest flowering seasons on Earth.
Q 30Which American poet's father, the entomologist Otto, wrote the 1934 study Bumblebees and Their Ways?
Sylvia Plath
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.