When you run a website like mine you get to see a daily report of what people typed in the little search box that landed them on your site. This is anonymous—it’s just a list of phrases—but it’s fascinating. Every day I get dozens of these entries—misspellings and all—that show what was on someone’s mind when they landed here at Honey Bee Suite.
I mention this because every day my list features five or six people who want to know how to kill bumble bees. Bumble bees! This amazes me. Bumble bees seem so innocuous, so friendly, so unlikely to cause anyone distress. Quite frankly, I can understand someone wanting to kill honey bees, but bumble bees? Not in my wildest dreams.
That anyone would want to kill a hardworking creature that’s out minding its own business is puzzling. I don’t think I’ve ever known anyone to get stung by a bumble bee, and they don’t chase people—so what is it? Even little kids are taught that bumble bees are friendly—cartoon bees are always smiling, very yellow, and annoyingly good-natured.
Perhaps it’s a case of mistaken identity. Something like a wasp is chasing them—or going for their ham sandwich—and they assume it’s a bumble bee. Or maybe our all-encompassing love affair with insecticides makes us think that the only good bug is a dead bug. Or maybe it’s movies and television that show impossibly large man-eating insects doing just that.
It’s probably a good thing my search terms are anonymous because I’d like to ask each of these people why they want to kill bumble bees. Actually I’d like to grab them by the collar and shake them, but I try to stay within the law for the most part.
My best guess is that we are dealing with a total lack of awareness of the “good bugs”—of pollinators, decomposers, natural enemies of agricultural pests, and insects that become food for birds and lizards and frogs. Short of shaking some sense into people, the best we can do is to keep educating those around us—every single chance we get.
Rusty
I have planted lots of bee attracting plants so that my honeybees would have plenty of nectar. However I now find all these plants filled with bumblebees – hundreds of them – while our honeybees have to resort to the poor sources of nectar available in the forest nearby.
I love bumblebees but fear I’ve created an overpopulation situation that is harmful to our honey bees.
what to do?
Huguette,
Since I started planting for honey bees, I’ve been inundated by bumble bees as well. But don’t worry. If the environment is healthy enough to support bumble bees it will be excellent habitat for all kinds of pollinators, including honey bees. The bumble bees won’t overrun the honey bees. Honey bees have a high degree of floral fidelity, which means when they go out on a foraging trip they collect from one kind of plant only. As a result, they look for large expanses of one kind of flower–something we usually don’t have in our yards. Bumble bees, on the other hand, go from one type of a plant to another, and so they are more likely to be found where there is a mixture of flower types.
I don’t know where you live, but my honey bees forage almost exclusively in the forest. They have been healthy for years and they make great honey.
By the way, bumble bees are endangered in many parts of the world. I don’t think you can have an overpopulation. It sounds like you are doing good things for the pollinators . . . and your honey bees will be fine.
This question isn’t related to the specific topic of this post, but it’s about bumble bees:
Are bumble bees a carrier of Varroa mites?
I ask because I’ve heard of a farmer where I live importing bubble bees for pollination of cranberry plants. We don’t have mites where I live (in Newfoundland) and I’m concerned that importing bumble bees could be risky.
Phillip,
The reproductive cycle of bumble bees is totally unlike that of honey bees so Varroa destructor would not be able to reproduce and thrive on them. Bumble bees carry a variety of Nosema of their own, Nosema bombi, that has transferred into wild populations of bumble bees from greenhouse bumbles. However, little is known about the cross-species movement of most bee diseases and parasites, and the possibility of cross-species infection always exists.
Thanks. I’m too busy to say more. Catch you later.