As I headed off to work, I stopped to fill the bird bath and surprised a fuzzy gold-and-black visitor investigating my mint patch. There haven't been many bumblebees around lately in our suburb, and I was glad to see her plump, fuzzy body wandering among the mint and Queen Ann's Lace. A good-natured neighbor who does a service to the neighborhood, she and her family have gotten a lot of bad press from the Africanized honeybee invasion and people who don't know one bee from another often kill these lovely insects our of fear.
"Bumblebee" is the common name for those large, fuzzy, black-and-yellow social bees that live in the Northern hemisphere. They're a fairly large bee, usually measuring about three-quarters of an inch in length. They're also one of the most primitive of bees, and actually have to spend some time learning how to forage and what flowers to select!
These are social bees that live in a small colony (under 400 members, with around 30-150 workers at any given time) and have a a caste system with a single queen and many workers that help raise the next generations of bees. Unlike honeybees, they build their nests on or close to the ground (although some have been found nesting in odd places like dryer vents). Becaues of the small colony size, they're the best choice of pollinator if you need to pollinate plants in a small area (like a small garden) or an enclosed space like a greenhouse.
Bee pollination is necessary for some crop plants to develop fully. Without bees, your blueberries would be blah, your cranberries would cause you chagrin, and your tomatoes - well, you shouldn't serve them to your mother-in-law. Not if you want to stay in her good graces, that is. These are a few of the many crops that need loud-buzzing bees (like my morning visitor, the bumblebee) to pollinate them.
If you have a colony of bumblebees in your area, you may find to your disappointment that they're not around the next year. The colony "life cycle" for bumblebees is only a year. The queen is the only bumblebee that lives through the winter, hibernating in a crevice. In the spring, she selects a new nest site and lines the cavity with dry grass or moss. After this, she collects a mass of pollen and nectar that will feed the first of her offspring - her daughter workers. Throughout the spring and summer, more of these infertile workers will be born. In the late summer, the queen begins producing male and female bees capable of starting new colonies - and so the cycle continues.
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