20 May: Bumble Bees

Today is World Bee Day. Since I've already covered Honey Bees, here are ten things you might not know about bumble bees.

1. Why bumble bee? The word "bumble" means to hum, buzz, drone, or move ineptly or flounderingly. The generic name is Bombus, which was assigned by Pierre André Latreille in 1802. It is derived from the Latin word for a buzzing or humming sound.
2. The first mention of a bumblebee in the English language occurred in 1530, when John Palsgrave wrote, "I bomme, as a bombyll bee dothe." Another word which has been used for a bumble bee is "dumbledor".
3. There are over 250 species in the genus, including the Bombus dahlbomii of South America, which is the largest bumblebee. The queens of this species are sometimes described as looking like flying Mice.
4. Unlike honeybees, bumblebees do not produce Honey, but they play an important role in pollination.
5. They also differ from honeybees in that they don't die if they sting. Male bumblebees can't sting at all, and while the females can, they generally don't unless their nest is being attacked.
6. Another difference is that bumblebees don't perform complex dances to tell other bees where the pollen is. When they return from a successful foraging mission they'll run around the nest for a while before going out again. It's thought they are somehow communicating using the buzzing sounds their wings make.
7. Their metabolism is extremely fast. They have to eat pretty much all the time. A bumblebee with a full stomach will use up all its energy in about 40 minutes.
8. A queen bumblebee can store sperm and use it several months later to fertilise her eggs (which are shaped like sausages). Fertilised eggs hatch into female bees while unfertilised ones produce male bees. Hence a female bumblebee is 75 percent related to her sisters, but only 50 percent related to her children, who get half their genes from their father. Male bumblebees have only one chromosome.
9. It's often said that the laws of aerodynamics prove the bumblebee shouldn't be able to fly. Nobody knows where that urban myth originated. It may have been a result of an anecdote about an unnamed Swiss aerodynamicist at a dinner party, who performed some rough calculations and came to that conclusion as a joke. Obviously, they do fly - A bumblebee flaps its wings 200 times per second. That’s a similar RPM to some motorcycle engines. While foraging, bumblebees can reach ground speeds of up to 15 m/s (54 km/h).
10. The Flight of the Bumblebee is a piece of classical music by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. It represents Prince Guidon being turned into a bumblebee so he can fly away to visit his father, Tsar Saltan, in the opera The Tale of Tsar Saltan.

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