![]() As new workers emerge, the more senior workers will adopt new colony tasks according to age (Johnson 2010). Younger workers feed and care for the developing brood, while older workers are foragers. In honey bees, the division of labor is dependent on age. Task allocation is also a feature shared by both honey bees and bumble bees. Their purpose is to mate with virgin queens that are typically reared by the colony during late summer. Male drones have fewer responsibilities to the colony and are less abundant than the workers. The queen is the only one in the colony to lay eggs, while the workers maintain the hive and bring in local pollen and nectar resources. Each colony includes a single queen, nonreproductive female workers, and male drones. And, as with honey bees, individuals within the colony are divided into three distinct castes. Just like with honey bees, all individual bumble bees work together as a colony through the late spring, summer, and fall months. Bumble Bees Versus Honey Bees: How Do They Compare? Two important crops grown in Pennsylvania that relies on buzz pollination to produce fruit include blueberries and tomatoes, whose pollen reserves are hidden in the flowers and must be buzzed, or sonicated, to be released. This practice allows them to collect pollen from flowers that are more difficult for honey bees to reach. During buzz pollination, bees vibrate their flight muscles at just the right frequency while holding on to a blossom to dislodge pollen grains that are tightly packed away in the flower. Pollen stored on the body of bees is transmitted to the female reproductive organ (the stigma) of the flower as they fill their pollen baskets, resulting in fertilization, and ultimately, the development of fruits, seeds, and/or nuts.Īll bees possess branched hairs that enable pollen transfer between flowers, but buzz pollination is a specialized behavior performed by many large-bodied bees, including bumble bees. ![]() Together, the scopae and the corbiculae make a pollen basket, which can be easily seen with the naked eye. Just like honey bees, bumble bees store pollen within specialized branched hairs, (or scopae), that are located in a groove on their hind legs (called corbiculae). Bumble bees are excellent pollinators due to the way that they attract and disperse pollen from their bodies with each floral visit, and because of a unique foraging behavior they engage in called buzz pollination. The old queen does not usually live past the late summer or fall.Of over 250 known bumble bee species, 18 are found in Pennsylvania (Kilpatrick & López-Uribe 2020). The males die and the large females which are destined to become next years queens feed heavily in preparation for hibernation in overwintering sites. The late summer males and females that emerge leave the nest and mate. By mid summer, the queen not only lays eggs destined to become daughters, but also lays eggs that will become males or drones. Throughout the summer more mature daughters emerge and so the colony grows in numbers and the workers also become larger as their food limitation becomes less. The mature daughters become the foraging force. ![]() With the first batch of mature daughters the queen forages less and less and instead stays in the nest and rears more daughters. These workers are generally very small as the queen was only able to provide them with limited food. The queen raises her daughters through several larva stages, a pupa stage and upon completion of this stage they metamorphose to worker bees, in a month to a month and a half. When the eggs hatch, the queens forage for pollen and nectar on early spring flowering trees and shrubs and early blooming herbaceous wild flowers. ![]() The queens lay fertilized eggs, incubate them and keep them warm with their body heat. Nest sites are often abandoned rodent or rabbit burrows that the queens find by smell. In the early spring, queens emerge from their overwintering sites and search for nest sites. Many of these sites are in the forest edge. The queens then seek out protected overwintering sites in stonewalls and fallen trees. In the late summer and fall they mate (the males die) and the queens feed heavily on late summer and fall flowers such as asters and goldenrods. Only new queens (produced at the end of the summer) overwinter. The general life cycle of the bumble bee differs a bit in different parts of the U.S., but in the Northeast the life cycle is as follows. ![]()
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