It’s now not simple being a queen — a bumblebee queen, this is. To start out her colony within the spring, an expectant queen should first continue to exist the iciness through hibernating on my own within the soil, the place she’s susceptible to hazards like floods.
It seems those bee queens are royally as much as the duty. In a serendipitous discovery, researchers have discovered that hibernating bumblebee queens can continue to exist being submerged in water for as much as every week.
Bee biologists Sabrina Rondeau and Nigel Raine had been finding out how hibernating queens reply to pesticide publicity (SN: 3/29/12). Condensation within the fridge storing the dormant bees in Raine’s lab on the College of Guelph in Canada unintentionally brought about 4 of the vials housing queens to flood, the pair describe April 17 in Biology Letters.
“I used to be very involved to start with,” says Rondeau, now on the College of Ottawa. “I assumed, in fact, they had been lifeless.” However to her nice marvel, when she picked the queens up with forceps they began fidgeting — undeniably alive.
Rondeau and Raine made up our minds to check extra conscientiously simply how water-resistant bumblebee queens are. They collected 143 commonplace japanese bumblebee queens (Bombus impatiens) left over from every other experiment (those bees are to be had commercially, and weren’t amassed from the wild). Seventeen queens served as controls and weren’t submerged underwater, whilst the others had been both submerged or left floating at the water’s floor for both 8 hours, 24 hours or one week. The entire bees had been housed in person vials and saved at chilly hibernation temperatures.
This used to be intended to imitate conceivable real-world flooding situations, the place a queen’s hibernation chamber may just doubtlessly be stuffed with water or solely partly submerged. How steadily that occurs is unknown. Observations of bumblebees overwintering within the wild are scarce, however queens were discovered to normally want sloped flooring and sandy soils that will now not be vulnerable to flooding. Even so, it kind of feels the bugs are ready for crisis.
It became out that the 4 queens who survived unintentional refrigerator flooding had been rarely outliers. Of the 21 queens that had been submerged for seven days after which allowed to renew hibernating, 17 had been nonetheless alive 8 weeks after their aquatic ordeal. This fee of survival used to be now not statistically other from that of the 17 bees that had been by no means submerged — 15 of them survived to 8 weeks.
When first pulling the queens out of the water, Rondeau says they seemed like a bee that you just’d fish out of a swimming pool. However after an afternoon again within the fridge, “they’re fluffy once more, gorgeous, like not anything took place,” she says. “Extraordinarily unexpected.”
The discovering raises many extra questions, Raine says. “Does it impact their skill to discovered colonies? Does it impact reproductive fulfillment of the colony?”
There’s additionally the query of the way the queens organize to continue to exist being underwater for see you later. Many grownup bugs have diversifications to lend a hand them steer clear of drowning, like ultimate their spiracles — the physique openings they breathe via — to forestall water from entering into. Rondeau suspects that the diminished metabolism of hibernating queens additionally is helping, as they may be able to pass longer with their spiracles closed than they might in the event that they had been totally unsleeping and energetic.
“What it actually displays is how little we all know — and what kind of there may be to be informed — in regards to the bumblebee lifestyles cycle,” says Elizabeth Crone, a biologist on the College of California, Davis. “Their interactions with vegetation are one of the vital highest studied phenomena in ecology. Against this, we all know little or no about their nesting, hibernation and copy.”