The Buzz on Bumble Bees
Bumble bees are the panda bears of the insect world. Don’t you think? They’re big, roly-poly and fuzzy. Their distinctive markings make for darling toddler Halloween costumes. They’re a little clumsy, kinda cuddly, and utterly unself-conscious.
Some admirers have gone so far as declaring that the cutest part of the bumble is its tushie. There’s even a whole photographic compendium of bumble bee butts. My favorite entry:
Beneath the charm, though, bumble bees (genus Bombus) do serious work as pollinators. Entomologist Doug Tallamy succinctly explains how pollinators are essential to life as we know it:
“In addition to pollinating a third of our crops, animals (bees, bats, hummingbirds, and others, but mostly bees) are responsible for pollinating 87 percent of all plants and 90 percent of all angiosperms (flowering plants)...So if pollinators were to disappear, 87 to 90 percent of the plants on planet Earth would also disappear. Not only would such a loss be a fatal blow to humans, it would take most other multicellular species with it as well.”
As discussed here, honey bees get a lot of attention due to colony collapse disorder and the threat this poses to crops. I wish honey bees well, but they’re essentially winged livestock that were imported from Europe with the colonists. Before they arrived, 4000 species of native bees were already hard at work doing the bulk of the continent’s pollination. We should be at least as concerned about the survival of the 4000 native bees as the one imported species.
Butterflies also get a lot of credit as pollinators, I suppose because they’re beautiful and charismatic. But despite all the time they spend nectaring and vogueing on flowers, butterflies apparently lack body shapes conducive to transferring pollen for most flowers. In contrast, bees tend to have specialized adaptations for pollinating particular flower types. They’re the heavy pollen lifters.
Bumble bees make up 51 of the 4000 native bee species and they’re significant pollinators of many plants, including agricultural crops such as apples, pears, cherries, blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, tomatoes and squash.
Aside from being cute and industrious, bumble bees have some characteristics that make them especially good at their job. First, the females, who do all of the purposeful pollen collection, have “pollen baskets.” These are essentially flared tibias on their hind legs. Not quite bell bottoms; more like gauchos. With big pockets. As the bees fly from flower to flower collecting pollen on their abdomens and other furry parts, they comb the tiny grains into those baskets, allowing them to make the most of each foray out of the nest.
Bumble bees can fly at relatively cool temperatures and low light levels, making them useful to early-spring blooms. They’re more disciplined than most bees at sticking to a single plant species at a time (a trait called “floral constancy”), which means the flowers they visit are more likely to get the pollen they need in order to reproduce. They have longer tongues than most other bees, so they can get at the nectar (and thus collect the pollen) of some otherwise inaccessible flowers. They also have the heft to muscle their way into complex flowers.
But the thing I may love most about bumble bees is their ability to “buzz pollinate.” My (somewhat fanciful) interpretation of the technical jargon is this: a bumble bee will squirm her way into a flower and then shake her booty, causing pollen to flutter down from all around like so much disco glitter. Someone managed to calculate that in this way, she can collect pollen 6.5 times faster than a honey bee at a lowbush blueberry. With those big pockets in her wide-leg pants, she can also carry far more produce, making her a very efficient forager.
While most native bees are solitary, bumble bees are social. They live for a few months each year in a small colony. These groupings aren’t as large or as organized as a honeybee hive, but they include queens, workers and males, each with their own responsibilities related to rearing the next generation. They like to build their nests in protected spots in or near the ground, but they’re not great at digging, so they seek out abandoned rodent holes, rotting logs, and blankets of leaf litter.
Most bumble bee species have a preferred suite of plants that they’ll visit (see a partial list below). If those plants aren’t available they may turn to others, but that usually means they won’t get the nutrition they need for producing larvae or even surviving themselves.
If you’d like to do your part to turn around bumble bee declines — which have become drastic — here are some steps you can take:
Plant native trees, shrubs and perennials that provide a variety of flower colors and forms and bloom in succession throughout the spring, summer and autumn.
Avoid insecticides and other pesticides. Those mosquito sprays will wipe out bumble bees, too.
Create and protect bumble bee nesting habitats by leaving leaves and logs on the ground and letting rodent holes be.
Avoid introducing honey bees, which will compete for resources.
Encourage your neighbors to join you in bumble bee fandom, so we can start knitting their fragmented habitats back together.
To help get you in the spirit of things, here’s K.C. and the Sunshine Band on Soul Train with – you saw this coming, right? – Shake Your Booty.
A partial list of native plants that provide critical nectar or pollen for bumble bees across the seasons (remember always to check what’s native to your ecoregion):
Resources
Dr. Heather Holm, “The Bombus Among Us – Bumble Bee Basics,” Wild Ones video, September 25, 2020.
Leif Richardson, “Bees at Home: the Natural History of Bumble Bee Nesting,” Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation video, January 18, 2022.
Douglas W. Tallamy, Nature’s Best Hope, Timber Press, 2019.
“Rusty Patched Bumble Bee,” Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation website.
Another good one, Laura! And I love the classic videos at the end. Good info and so much fun.
Who knew?? Thanks once again for teaching me something important about bumble bees.