When gardening, you have probably seen large, fuzzy, yellow and black bumble bees zipping from flower to flower, collecting pollen and nectar to bring back to their nests. Perhaps you have also seen them in January or February and wondered what business a bee has flying around in winter. Nearly all the approximately 1,600 bee species in California are solitary, meaning they don’t form colonies when nesting. Bumble bees are our only North Coast native bees that have a social lifestyle similar to that of the honeybee. In the Humboldt Bay area, we have four common bumble bee species, although others visit sporadically.
The life story of a queen bumble bee starts in late summer or fall when the old queen (our heroine’s mom) stops producing worker bees and starts producing reproductive bees: queens and male drones who will pass on her genetic line. When the new queens and drones leave the colony, they mate and then the drones die. The newly mated queens find a protected place, usually underground, to spend the winter in a state of torpor. Because of Humboldt’s moderate coastal winters, these hibernating queen bees may come out to collect nectar on sunny winter days. You may see them on manzanita because it is one of the few native plants blooming in winter and therefore an important nectar plant for overwintering pollinators.
Winter nectar is vital to the queen’s chances of successfully starting a colony in the spring. The amount of fat she has maintained over the winter will have a profound effect on her success when it’s time to build a nest. She will need plenty of energy to find a nest site for the colony, lay eggs, manufacture cells to hold her eggs, collect nectar and pollen to feed the larvae, and keep the nest warm (which she does by rapidly quivering her body and wings to burn fat). Yes, she is a hard worker.
She does all these tasks alone until her first brood emerges as adults. This first generation of workers (smaller female bumble bees) will help her collect nectar and pollen and feed the next batch of larvae. Once the queen has sufficient workers in the colony, she can stay home and produce eggs. This is an amazing amount of knowhow for a single bumble bee with no instruction manual nor parental guidance, only what is hardwired into her DNA. Be sure to acknowledge her contributions when you are both working in the garden this summer.
While I am against supplemental feeding of any wild animal, I often rescue bumble bee queens in winter and early spring, when they come out on a sunny but cold day to gather nectar from manzanita flowers. If the sky clouds over, causing the temperature to drop rapidly, the queens may not be able to make it back to safety. When I find a bumble bee on a flower or plant, I leave her outside. However, finding a queen on the ground who, despite my best encouragement, can’t fly, I will bring her inside to warm up. If she appears active, I feed her dilute honey (recipe: one drop of honey and three drops of water) on a toothpick, let her sit at room temperature for an hour, and then … put her in the fridge. (She can “hibernate” there for up to three days.) When the sun shines again, I put her outside in a bright, warm spot and wish her success in her queenly endeavors.
Pete Haggard (he/him) and Jane Monroe (she/her) are the coauthors of Rewilding: Native Gardening for the Pacific Northwestand North Coast, available now from The Press at Cal Poly Humboldt and in local bookstores and nurseries.
This article appears in The Siren’s Song Returns at Jim Dunn’s.