Hello Everyone,
It feels like I say this a lot but “what a strange month it has been!”
Heat wave for half of month with temperatures past 40°C and now its torrential rain and generally a ‘damp’ outlook.
After my last post about how local honey is better than supermarket honey I made another poll on my social media accounts asking what people would like me to write about.
As you can see, it is a solid draw between ‘Bumblebee FAQs’ and ‘How to make a quick Cider’. I’ve decided to do the bumblebee FAQs for this month as I will be taking you through the cider making process step by step next month and I’m wanting to have lots of pictures and videos for you to compare against your own attempt.
H’okay, time to get down to bumble-business! These FAQs are in no particular order, just as I’ve received the questions.
Do Bumblebees Produce Honey?
No.
I’ll go into more detail about why in the next question, but bumblebees don’t produce honey in most cases and in the cases that they do it is in minimal amounts and is used up in quick succession. Unlike honeybees that have thousands of workers, most bumblebee colonies consist of several hundred, so just don’t have the capacity to collect an excess of nectar and pollen. They live their lives pretty hand to mouth… or tarsal claw to proboscis rather.
Do Bumblebees Hibernate? / What is the Bumblebee Life Cycle?
I’ve put these questions together as they go hand in hand. Starting off with, Yes, Bumblebees do hibernate… ish…, well the queens do anyway, and it’s called a “winter diapause” as only animals can technically “hibernate”. Newly fertilised queens fly off on their own at the end of autumn and find a nice little nook or cranny to hunker down and snooze their way through the coldest of months. #Jealous
The life cycle of the bumblebee begins as the weather starts to warm up in spring. Our bleary-eyed queen slowly wakes when the correct ambient temperature is reached for her particular species. As the temperature will probably still be quite low (5-8°C) she will need to warm up her core temperature and stretch out her muscles. To do this, she does a little “dance” where she wiggles all of her legs and vibrates her flight muscles really fast. You may actually hear her if you’re walking past a tree stump or exposed root on a warm winters day as it makes quite a bit of noise. After this, when she’s all limber and toasty, she flies off to find her first meal of the year, pollen and nectar.
Early flowers are far and few between, so she works hard at this time in her life, doing more warm up dances as her body temperature drops throughout the foraging process. This time in the queen’s life is fraught with danger and most die to starvation or get eaten by equally hungry predators or even get wiped out by random cold periods. The ones that do find enough food to survive now start looking for a nice nesting spot. An abandoned rodent hole, bird box with an old nest, fascia board cavity, compost bin, or leaf pile (etc) can provide a suitable home, depending on the species. What they are looking for is somewhere well sheltered out of the wind and rain that is relatively waterproofed and has insulation or can be insulated easily. You will probably see singular fluffy bees flying around buildings looking for any holes in the walls or roof early spring.
Once the nest site has been located, the queen bumble bee will build a little wax cup inside it, which she will fill with nectar to sustain her whilst she incubates her eggs. Think of it as her prepping for a night in with the kids by getting in a bunch of snacks. She then creates a few more wax cups, in which she deposits a mound of pollen and then lays an egg in each. She’ll then incubate the eggs by huddling over the top of them, and vibrates her flight muscles again to generate heat to a temperature of around 30 °C.
There the queen stays for 14 straight days vibrating her wings almost constantly, talk about a feat of endurance! It takes around 4 days for the eggs hatch into larvae (white maggoty looking things) which feed on the pile of pollen their queen so lovingly left them and grow. The larvae go through several stages in development (shedding their skin 3 times) until after 14th day, when they produce silken cocoons and pupate. Within the pupae, the larvae shed their skin once more, and undergo metamorphosis.
At this point the queen caps the cell cups with wax and then flies off to refill her stock of nectar and collect pollen for her next round of bees. After another 14 days, the little grub-like larvae in the capped cells have transformed into young bumble bees. After wriggling a bit inside their cells to orientate themselves, they chomp their way through the top of their cocoons and cell cap to emerge as a beautiful floofball of buzz.
The first bees to emerge from these cocoons are young female workers (similarly to honeybees, all worker bees are females with undeveloped ovaries). Within a day or two, these workers set about helping the queen, initially with nest duties while their flight muscles strengthen, but will then go out to forage for pollen and nectar for rearing the next rounds of brood. Eventually as more workers are born the responsibilities of the queen will reduce to solely focusing on laying eggs.
In its lifecycle, a colony of bumble bees could have anywhere between 50 – 500 workers but will commonly comprise of around 120 to 200.
Around mid to late summer, the queen will stop producing workers, and will switch to rearing young queens and males.
The young queens, once emerged from their cells, may remain in the nest for a while, chomping on excesses of nectar and pollen to increase their fat reserves, in preparation for the next stage of their lives.
Once the males have emerged, they will soon leave the nest in search of mating opportunities elsewhere. This is when most people realise that they have a bees nest in their house or birdbox, as the males from neighbouring colonies hover around nest entrances in great number and it can be a little intimidating to witness.
The males are waiting for a young queen to emerge from the nest, when they pounce on the poor lass, usually grabbing hold of her causing her to plummet to the ground. The male will then “attach” himself to her and then the two fly off together in tandem.
Not long after this, the old queen will slowly die, leaving the remaining workers to dwindle and die off as there is no-one left to create any more bees. Generally, as bumble bees feel that they are close to death, they will take themselves off as to not be a burden to the rest of the colony (I’m not crying, you are!) which is why you rarely find bees in a dead nest. This is also the reason why bumblebees don’t make honey; they have no need for it. Honeybees survive winter as a full colony of bee huddled together, keeping each other warm. This requires a lot of energy for a lot of mouths. With the bumblebees dying off, making honey would be a waste of time which could be used to create more young queens and males.
Now, try not to be too sad as although in the case of bumble bees, the whole colony will die, the young, newly fertilised queens, will go through their “winter diapause” (hibernate), and re-emerge the following year to establish new colonies of their own. And so, the next generation of bumble bees will begin anew.
When Am I Most Likely to See Bumblebees?
Depending on the species and ambient temperatures, queen bumblebees will appear in the spring from March onwards. However, some species may appear as early as late January! The end of a bee life cycle, when the queen and nest die, generally starts to occur around August but can take until early November for the last bee in a nest to buzz.
The most likely time to realise that there is a nest located anywhere is mid-June to late August when the males are flying around nest entrances waiting for young queens.
Do Bees Reuse Old Nests?
No.
Bumblebees may reuse the same entrance to a cavity if there is enough space for more than one nest, but they won’t reuse an old one.
Are Bumblebees Endangered?
This is an awkward one to answer as I’ve only learned this after doing a bit of research and I’ve actually been falling for the “every bumblebee is endangered” trap … So to those I’ve spoken to in the past, I’m very sorry for giving you false information.
Here is the truth: According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which is the global body that decides every species’ population status, the meaning of endangered is:
“Endangered (EN), species that possess a very high risk of extinction as a result of rapid population declines of 50 to more than 70 percent over the previous 10 years (or three generations), a current population size of fewer than 250 individuals, or other factors.”
This means that although almost all bumblebees worldwide are steadily declining in number, there are only a minority of species of bumblebees that are actually endangered.
Of the many species of bee catalogued by the IUCN from around the world, 13 bumblebees (known by the genus Bombus) are classified as endangered or critically endangered. The IUCN lists 90 species of bumblebee in total. This means that the majority of bumblebees are nowhere near going extinct.
That being said, the Bumblebee Conservation Trust states that there are “24 species of bumblebee in the UK, of which only seven or eight are widespread and abundant”. None of the IUCN endangered species of bumblebee are found in the UK, although there are some species which it classifies as “vulnerable”. Please don’t see that the lack of “endangered” status means we can relax and not care about our floofy buzzer friends. The IUCN has a global reach meaning they can only focus on a small most urgent number of species to save. The Bumblebee Conservation Trust says eight species are currently listed on at least one of the English, Welsh and Scottish conservation priority species lists due to a decline in numbers within the UK.
So, although our native species aren’t on the endangered list, we should still do everything in our power to prevent them from ending up on it eventually!
Are Honeybees Out-Competing Bumblebees for Food and Causing Their Decline?
This is a strangely common topic of debate for conservationists or the “did you know…” kind of people. Most bees use the same resources to survive (apart from the vulture bee which is the Ozzy Osbourne of the insect world) meaning that they will inevitably compete if there is only a small number of flowers to supply them all with food. So, in towns and cities, where there are few flowers for pollinators, it may cause an issue to have a honeybee hive. This is more of a forage problem than a honeybee problem though, the answer to this is to rewild or plant more in urban areas. So, what about in rural areas?
Some Norwegian researchers worried about this decided to observe flower visits both in raspberry fields, as well as in wild raspberries in the surroundings along with other wild flora. They found that in the raspberry fields, more than 97% of the flower visitors were honeybees and in wild raspberries, they were still the most dominant pollinator, but already 30.6% of the visitors were bumblebees. Surprisingly though, with all other plants recorded, bumblebees made 92.3% of all flower visits.
This means that there was competition for raspberry flowers between honeybees and bumblebees, but not for wildflowers. Even for raspberry, the competition was already less outside the managed fields.
Honeybees are highly ‘flower constant’ which means that if they begin to forage on one flower species, they will stay on it until it’s gone. Apparently, they also have a preference for high flower density in a field rather than a more spread-out selection of wildflowers. Bumblebees on the other hand, were able to exploit other floral resources, meaning that they are able to get everything they need unhindered by their distant relation.
So Why Do People Think That Honeybees Are the Cause of Bumblebee Decline?
There are two types of pollinators, ‘generalists’ which will go to any and every flower and ‘specialists’ with a very narrow selection of flowers they will feed from. Honeybees and bumblebees are both generalist pollinators, they appear in large numbers to collect nectar and pollen from any and every flower they can find and as mentioned earlier, don’t really compete as such with each other. This “out-competing” rumour comes from another source instead that has been extrapolated by hearsay.
Generalist pollinators WILL out-compete the specialists, such as the heather bee (Colletes succinctus) for example. Heather plants only flower for a specific window of time throughout the year and unfortunately with the popularity of heather honey, lots of beekeepers around the country transport their hives to moorland to get their share. This is unfortunately putting a lot of pressure on the heather bee and other ‘specialist’ pollinators.
So, in short, honeybees and bumblebees do compete but not enough to cause harm to one another in rural areas. It’s the proliferation of heather honey, among other specialist honeys, that has actually caused issues for other native specialist pollinators but unless the demand drops then this may continue to be a possible problem.
Are Bumblebees Protected by UK Law?
This is another one that I got wrong! It really shows that you need to do your own research rather than just believe everything you hear!
No, bees have no legal protection in the UK.
A laboratory-based entomologist who (ironically) works at Rentokil's European Technical Centre looked into why everyone believes this rumour here: https://www.rentokil.co.uk/blog/do-bees-have-legal-protection/
Can I or Someone Else Relocate a Bumblebee Nest?
With no legal protections you can do whatever you want to bumblebee nests BUT you have to think about the morality behind it. As I’ve already stated above, bumblebees are declining rapidly and if you can deal with a nest flying about for several months then is it really worth getting someone in to move or kill them? I will always ask people to leave them alone and give tips to mitigate the chances of conflict.
Most of the calls I get for bumblebees are related to them having a nest in either a birdbox, compost bin or wall cavity.
Bumblebees in a bird box are definitely the easiest to relocate. In essence all you need to do is block the entrance at night (bees can’t fly in the dark) and move the whole bird box over 3 miles away, before releasing them. I would recommend a bee suit for this as although they can’t fly at night, they can fly in torch light which you will most likely need to see what you’re doing.
The other two are complicated and generally will end up in the death of the bee nest. Unless the nest is easily accessible in the compost bin you will have to carefully dig down to find it and carefully transfer it to a new container, such as a wooden box. You’ll then have to leave the box in the compost bin until night when you can do the same thing as you did with the birdbox. You will need a bee suit for all of this as bees will sting anything messing with their hive and bumblebee stings are worse than honeybee and wasp stings in my opinion. Doing this will remove the bees but chances are they will die as their nests are not made to be manhandled, sadly.
Wall cavities either have to have bricks on the outside removed or a section of plaster cut out to access it. This is expensive and damages your house. Most pest exterminators will simply kill the bees which is a massive shame.
Can You Remove a Nest for Me?
Although I have now learned that I’m legally allowed to move bumblebee nests, I lack the insurance to do so. If they are in a bird box and are a real danger to the young or infirm then I will see what I can do but if they are in the roof or under the floor, the best thing you can do is just leave them until they die off naturally in winter or get an exterminator if you really can’t live with them and insist on getting rid.
How Can I Help Bumblebees?
You can help prevent the decline in bumblebee numbers by increasing their food supply and habitats. #RewildingRainford
As mentioned earlier, winter/spring is the time fraught with most danger to bumblebees, when the queen is searching relentlessly for enough food to start her nest. During this time winter and early spring flowering shrubs and plants, such as mahonia, pussy willow, rosemary, winter heathers, blackthorn, berberis, crocuses, and Muscari (grape hyacinth) provide a vital lifeline for bumble bees.
Of course, it’s always a good idea to provide plenty of foraging opportunities, with an abundance of flowers throughout the year, not just for bees but for all foragers.
You may think about making some artificial nests such as a store bought one or a DIY upturned terracotta pot nest, but in many cases, these are rarely successful in enticing bumblebee lodgers, BUT they do provide homes for other animals like mice, frogs and other insects which are also losing habitats equally as fast. So, I’d still recommend buying/building one because its fun and educational for little ones and useful for your local wildlife.
How Can I Prevent Bumblebees Making Nests on My Property?
In winter have a walk around your property and make a note of any holes or cracks in your walls or fascia boards. Find a way to either fill them up or put fine metal mesh over them before the queens come out of hibernation. Also don’t forget to clean out your bird boxes every year. Bumblebees (especially the aggressive Tree Bumblebees) love birdboxes with old bird nests inside. Another benefit of cleaning out old nests is that it will encourage birds to reuse the birdboxes again. As for compost heaps, there’s not really much you can do other than turn it over regularly which should encourage a healthy composting environment which is unsuitable for a bee nest.
Right then, I think that’s every question I’ve received answered…
I hope there was at least one thing interesting in there that made you think "gosh, that’s ruddy interesting!”. The lack of endangered status and legal protection genuinely surprised me at least so I’m happy with that.
Thank you for reading my wafflings, if you have any other questions then please leave them in the comments or sling me a message on facebook and I’ll try to answer what I can.
I hope you are all safe and well!
Greg