Kim Etchison, age 10, of Visalia, California, for her question:
What are the habits of the bumblebee?
A squadron of big fat bumblebees may save a farmer's fruit crop. The dainty orchard blossoms need visiting insects to get the young fruit started. When the blossom time weather turns cool, honeybees and most wild bees tend to stay home. But the sturdy, furry bumblebees go bravely forth to gather nectar and pollinate the trees as they shop from flower to flower. The bumblebee is one of the farmer's best friends. She performs several other useful chores that other insects cannot do. So for our own good we need to know about her habits and how to encourage her.
Bees are quick tempered creatures with painful stingers. Most folk are scared of a little honeybee and much more scared of a whopping bumblebee. She is twice as big as a honeybee and much fatter. Besides, whereas the honeybee can sting only once, the bumblebee lives to sting again. But we almost always notice her in time because of her loud buzz and her gaudy coat of furry black and yellow stripes. If we let her alone to go about her daily duties, she has no reason to sting us.
She is called a social insect because she shares a home with a colony of relatives. But compared with the honeybee's neat hive, the nest of the wild bumblebee is rather shabby. What's more, it lasts only through the summer. Come fall, the young queens leave home with escorts of drones. After a few days or weeks of marriage, each queen bumblebee hides herself in a cozy crevice and hibernates through the winter.
In spring she comes forth to feast on the nectar of early flowers and to select a suitable place for her nest. She may choose a deserted mouse burrow, a rocky crevice or just a thick clump of shaggy grass. Then she builds one or two waxy cells to hold honey and a wad of woolly material stuffed with pollen to hold her first brood of eggs. In three or four days, the eggs hatch into grubby larvae. For the next week or so, the young queen is busy gathering pollen and nectar to feed them. The growing larvae molt twice and eat their old skins. Then they spin silken cocoons and spend about 22 days in the resting pupa stage.
The first four to eight bumblebees are smallish workers. In a few days they take over the field and nest duties. The queen mother spends the rest of her life at home, laying eggs. By mid summer there may be 50 to 200 or 300 bees in the nest. Most of them are field workers and nursemaids. Later, numbers of drones and young queens hatch from the eggs. In early fall, they leave home. The weary old queen soon dies; so do the drones and the workers. Only the young queens survive the winter and start new colonies when spring comes around again.
The workers, drones and queens have different habits and share their life stories. The field worker's habits are very useful to farmers. For example, honeybees and most wild bees cannot gather nectar from red clover and honeysuckle, so they don't visit these plants. But the big bumblebee has an extra long tongue. She can reach down into these deep throated blossoms to get their sweet nectar. Dusty pollen brushes onto her fur and as she visits around she carries the grains from flower to flower.