Bumblebee queens breathe underwater to survive drowning | Hacker News Reader

Bumblebee queens breathe underwater to survive drowning

smithsonianmag.com

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One time I stored a bag of maple leaves in a garbage bag which I used for feeding my compost. I didn't need it much over winter, and in spring when I went to use it, dozens of bumblebees came out. They'd hibernated in a bag of leaves. It was such a cold winter for our climate (it hit -15°C one night!) and somehow they were just fine.

When I was a kid I didn't think much about where they hibernate, how, or why. But they're definitely a species that continually yields fascinating revelations. Apart from their ability to sleep in leaves for 6 months or so, they're also able to learn to use door flaps and, apparently, survive flooding. They're resilient little creatures.

Every animal seems to have surprising abilities and behaviours if you're just lucky enough to see it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1J9Cr_M5osI

That's how endless insects, ones genetically design to survive our winters, do so. They crawl under leaves and dying grass, which insulates them from the cold a bit. Their bodies can freeze and thaw, and they'll be fine.

If you watch robins in the spring, after the snow melts but before the ground thaws, you'll see them turning over leaves to find and eat the insects. I see a lot of this, because I have a lot of trees (rural property, with forest around me). Often there are robins migrating, who stop and fill up thanks to my lawn and its plentiful ground leaf cover.

As a child, I was taught that robins "eat worms". Well, they surely do. But I see them eating anything and everything which moves. They're a lot like chickens, I guess.

At dusk, I often see them standing around and catching moths and things which take flight. Leaping into the air and snapping them up. Fun to watch.

Robins only eat bugs and worms as part of their raising an egg and feeding the chicks. Once the chicks can feed themselves they all switch to fruit and seeds.

That is absolutely not my experience here. My local robins eat bugs and worms all year, however, I do see them eating fruit (wild raspberries) here, when they are in season, and the fruit of some trees. I've never seen a robin eat a seed, only fruit. Robins also have multiple broods each year here. At least two, sometimes three rounds of chicks, so it's only the very end of summer that they aren't raising chicks (or having one following them around).

In many places the summer gets very dry often near end of year, and by then most of the insects are hunted out. That, along with fruit coming into season, may be one reason you're seeing this behaviour? I live beside a river and a wetland, though, so I have insects and worms all the time.

I wonder if we're talking about different robins. European ones aren't the same as North American ones, and I'm in Canada (currently in Quebec, but the same robins are in Ontario/etc too)

American robins come to my bird feeder quite often, but it's really for the peanuts (protein) and berries. The seeds themselves are deshelled, so they do occasionally take a sunflower chip. Shelless seeds have the side effect of attracting birds that don't normally visit feeders.

It's kind of cute: I'll see my resident robin observing the other local birds at the feeder and decide that he/she needs to get in on that too. They're smarter than they appear.

You're are correct though in that I've never need them take a seed that has a shell. I'm not sure their beaks are made to crack them open.

Birds like cardinals, chickadees, titmice and nuthatches do find insects for their young (protein), but primarily eat seeds the rest of the year. I'll still see them come to the feeder when they have babies, but it's for the high protein seeds like sunflower and also peanut pieces.

Funny enough, some birds, such as American goldfinches, don't feed their offspring insects at all to discourage brood parasites like cowbirds. Cowbird nestlings need insect protein to survive and if a cowbird lays eggs in a goldfinch nest, that bird is doomed.

If you really want to watch them up close, look for a feeder with a camera. If you're lucky you'll get some great video of them deciding what to eat and what to feed their young.

Mid Atlantic, I might be wrong about the seeds part. Their diet does shift in the winter as at 40 latitude they only migrate to closer to the shore and eat berries there until the spring.

Decomposing and decaying organic material often generates heat (compost piles sometimes spontaneously catch on fire due to this). The bees may have survived due to that or maybe they were attracted to that in the first place.

Only if it's decomposing aerobically.

Anaerobic decomposition, like what you find in a septic tank, doesn't produce any heat.

Just happened to scroll past this just now:

"Beekeeper trains a bumblebee queen to use a protective cap in less than 24 hours. This protects the colony from hornets and similar threats."

https://x.com/MyLordBebo/status/2033115074982813727?s=20

I built such bumblebee houses a few years ago with the kids. The flap is essential against a kind of flies that lay their eggs in the bumblebee nest and their caterpillars eats the nest. Either the Queen or the others learn the usage quite fast. Sometimes next generation queens remember it in the next year

That's so cool! I have to try this with my kids. They will almost certainly not care, but what the hell.

Are you saying that a queen will die and its successor somehow knows how to use the door without learning like its mother had to?

No, the next generation queens grow in that swarm and learn it there. All swarm members learn it. To the queen (or the first few workers) you teach it. The rest learns from the others. But the workers are short living (few weeks). The queens live for about a year and can take knowledge in the next year.

> One time I stored a bag of maple leaves in a garbage bag which I used for feeding my compost. I didn't need it much over winter, and in spring when I went to use it, dozens of bumblebees came out.

This is definitely really interesting from a biological perspective but also immensely terrifying as soon as I visualize it. I might literally scream if I saw a swarm of what would appear to my panicked brain to be zombie bumblebees in my garage, and I'd certainly run and hide.

Haha, I thought it was surprising but very beautiful. I'm not bothered by insects at all, though.

Source paper: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article/293/2066/202...

> Published in Proceedings of the Royal Society Bee

(I keep noticing this, more and more websites are including unnecessarily huge images on top. This one has a 24 MP (6000×4000) header. At least it's a JPEG with "just" 5.83 MB, not a PNG.)

idk a nice high quality image of a Bumblebee queen seems suitable here

the holy patron saints of the internet gave us javascript and hyperlinks so that we could have both a gargantuan picture of a bee and a fast, responsive, small web transfer for discovering that gargantuan pictures' availability.

people forget these blessings, and we are now forced to eat 6MB of bee.

praise be the conscientious and adaptive-delivery-aware web engineer, amen.

amen

You can totally serve a superlight image by default which embed an hyperlink that point to the higher resolution image for those wishing to see it.

It is "to survive floods" not to "survive drowning."

I'm uncomfortable with the methods used in this experiment. We don't even have a consensus on if or how insects feel pain, but we're raising them in labs for the purpose of drowning them. As far as I know freezing or crushing insects is a humane way for them to go, and I'm sure this research will be beneficial for insect conservation, but ultimately it's all in the interest of maintaining an ecosystem that humans rely on with little concern for the insects' well-being.

Friend, much of Science involves mass murder of complex life including mammals, for the express purpose of teasing apart how their individual bits work. If you live near an R1 university, there's very likely a facility nearby dedicated to the raising of lab animals. An ex worked at one that raised rodents and chickens for Michigan State University.

A scientist once confided in me that he became a scientist because as a child he really liked lizards, but as a scientist, he spends much of his time murdering lizards. :-/

Everyone involved has to confront this reality on their own, come to terms with it, and figure out the line where they're willing to meet it. All the researchers I've known have cared deeply about the welfare of the animals, despite sometimes doing terrible things to them for science. They worked to limit their suffering and dispatch them as humanely as possible. Many rationalize it by comparing to the food system, which raises and slaughters orders of magnitude more souls, and keeps people living, but does not discover or record as much new knowledge as science.

> All the researchers I've known have cared deeply about the welfare of the animals, despite sometimes doing terrible things to them for science.

As far as I know it’s one of the few fields with authorities that can block animal cruelty on ethical grounds through ethical review boards (mandatory Institutional Animal Care and Use Committees in the case of federally funded research).

Researchers must submit detailed protocols describing exactly what they plan to do, how many animals they’ll use, what procedures will be performed, how pain and distress will be managed, and why alternatives like cell cultures won’t work. There’s a whole framework called the 3Rs: replace animals where possible, reduce the number used, and refine procedures to minimize suffering.

Science is the wrong tree to go barking up, especially given the impact of the research overall, compared to clothing or food or other animals products.

I can mostly agree. I have encountered a diagnosed sociopath in the sciences, and the systems within Science often seemed engineered entirely to provide justifications to the non-science folks with the bank details, so it has the normal human failings. But most of the people involved could have made more money in industry, and were there because they cared about the subject matter. Even the sociopath to the extent that word means anything in their context.

Ethics rubrics for animal studies and institutional review boards for same are definitely an area academia is doing better than most other human endeavors. I didn't mean to imply otherwise. More to emphasize the intense moral introspection each of the researchers I've known who have done animal studies have had to do about it.

I agree with the necessity of it, but I also find the argument "We do it because we do it." to be weak.

We do it because we lack better methods. Cart before the horse, since those better methods are often derived from cruel research, but that's the reason.

If we had a ray-gun to zap a bug with that gave us a perfect accurate reading of lactate levels within it we wouldn't resort to freezing the thing and then grinding it to dust.

This is definitely a nuanced issue. I'm sure there's worse going on than what's in this experiment, and the food industry is certainly far worse. I just wish we'd say the quiet part out loud and put more effort into discovering where that line should be. The ethics section of this paper in its entirety is:

> This work did not require ethical approval. We minimized the number of animals used in the experiment and kept manipulations to a minimum.

edit: formatting

> Many rationalize it by comparing to the food system, which raises and slaughters orders of magnitude more souls, and keeps people living, but does not discover or record as much new knowledge as science.

Add to this that people in the western world eat way more than they need. You only have to think of that all-you-can-eat restaurant.

Your misguided empathy is dangerous to humanity. So much of the vast genetic magic is hidden purely because we tie our hands behind our backs. Each day these secrets are withheld is another day tens of thousands of humans die from potentially trivial diseases and conditions. Further millions suffer in their broken minds for decades with no solace, all because we chose to extend our empathy in instantly gratified, short sighted ways. I say we go further, withdraw our empathy towards the worst among us; those that have hurt their fellow man, and make their bodies available for study and experimentation, both dead and alive.

This might sound fine as stated, but then you might be concerned a philosopher joins to dissect your brain to discover what you think is right and wrong.

If I was a convicted murderer I would deserve it.

We have all hurt our fellow man, just as we all hurt ourselves. We even have a word for it: sin!

I explicitly mean murder.

How noble. I nominate you to be first for the drowning experiment.

I suppose because of surface tension, at insect scales it is very easy for an insect to take a bubble of air underwater that is big enough for days of breathing.

Is there any way to attract bumblbees in one's landplot?

My grandfather had these hedge like bushes with giant red flowers lining the front windows that always had bumblebees. Im not great with identifying flowers; looked like Hibiscus maybe, but in a somewhat dense bush or hedge structure. Anyway, the bumblebees loved that. Didn't notice them anywhere else on the property, and the first time I saw them (4-5yo) I was quite terrified and would have remembered. They were huge and fury with bold colors and not afraid me, but not so scary after I learned about paper wasp from playing around in the wood-shed.

It really depends on where you live. I've found this site useful:

https://xerces.org/pollinator-conservation/pollinator-friend...

Make a few beds and allow them to be "wild" based on your region. All sorts of pollenating insects will show up, eventually.

They're after low-lying flowering plants, on my property. Basically weeds in the grass.

It’s so interesting that we’re only now finding this out

Edit: I’m wrong - ignore this please.

Bumblebees don’t sting, but they can bite, as I discovered after many years of picking them up when I saw them on the ground in a vulnerable spot.

They certainly do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bee_sting

> A bee sting is the wound and pain caused by the stinger of a female bee puncturing skin. Bee stings differ from insect bites, with the venom of stinging insects having considerable chemical variation. (..) Bumblebee venom appears to be chemically and antigenically related to honeybee venom.

Wasps both sting and bite (welt size is a good indicator)

Huh. I also have grown up thinking bumblebees don’t sting, but:

> Female bumblebees can sting repeatedly, but generally ignore humans and other animals. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bumblebee

So they can sting, they just don’t want to. Further proof, if any were needed, that bumblebees are Best Bees. :)

As a child, I caught a bumblebee in my hand because I didn't think it could sting. Those stings hurt.

IME, the nonviolence of their behavior matches their cute looks. They do not sting if you don't go out of your way to mess with them.

TIL that bumblebees actually can sting. Not only can they sting, they can sting repeatedly (unlike the honey bee). They just choose not to.

Genteel bees.

They are pretty docile so won't be as aggressive towards stinging, but certainly can sting. You might be thinking of honey bees - which also can and do sting, but which die if they sting, so they're heavily disincentivized to sting.

The addition of a single word makes your statement true: male. Males can't, females can.

https://web.archive.org/web/20071230082748/http://www.straig...

Cool findings. However, considering the endangered nature of bumblebees in North America, it is sad and frustrating to see the number of Queens sacrificed in the name of research. Hundreds if not more.

This was the most grotesque part of the research, that sacrificed 20 bees right here:

> They froze five bees at each stage of the experimental process: before submersion, after four days underwater, after eight days underwater and after one week of post-submersion recovery. The researchers then ground up the frozen queens and measured the concentration of lactate in the resulting mush.

This could have been done without needing to kill the Queen bees. One such method has been known since 2017, that draws their blood through their antennae:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5268409/

1) there are millions of honeybee hives in north america. Therefore thare a millions of queens associated with those hives

2) its very easy/straightforward to take a honeybee larve and raise it to be a queen (i.e. let it feed on royal jelly).

If you find animal research to be problematic, none of this changes anything. However, this did nothing to hurt honeybee colonies in north america.

Ti me it seems that the opinion is the result of anthropomorphizing bees. They exist in a different social order. Their survival depends on things that, if people were organized in such way, it would seem very wrong to people. Their survival depends on numbers much more than human survival. They’re just not equivalent.

I don’t think it’s the case if we’re referring to my personal opinion. But to be certain, I will dwell on it a bit longer.

Not to take from the thrust your comment but just so you know, bumblebees and honeybees are not the same species.. Bumblebee nests are somewhat different than hives, and the way in which they develop is different also.

I suppose I’m still not fully onboard, but I appreciate the thoughtful comment. It provides more perspective.

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