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Travel A road trip in Burgundy reveals far more than fine wine. Travel My Hometown In L. Subscriber Exclusive Content. Why are people so dang obsessed with Mars? However, the angle to the wing also creates vortices in the air — like small hurricanes. The eyes of those mini-hurricanes have lower pressure than the surrounding air, so, keeping those eddies of air above its wings helps the bee stay aloft. With so many species, it isn't surprising that bumblebees are found all over the world.
For example, the largest bumblebee is found in Argentina and Chile and the rusty patched bumblebee is found in the United States and Canada. Bumblebees usually build their nests close to the ground — under piles of wood, dead leaves and compost piles — or even below ground in abandoned rodent tunnels, according to Orkin. Bumblebees are some of the most social creatures in the animal kingdom.
A group of bumblebees is called a colony. Colonies can contain between 50 and individuals, according to the National Wildlife Federation. A dominant female called the queen rules the colony. The other bees serve her or gather food or care for developing larvae. During the late fall, the entire colony dies, except for the queen. She hibernates during the winter months underground and starts a new colony in the spring.
Bumblebees eat nectar and pollen made by flowers. The sugary nectar provides the bees with energy while the pollen provides them with protein, according to The Bumblebee Conservation Trust.
They feed the honey to the queen and the developing brood. The queen is the mother of all the bees in a colony. After waking from hibernation, the queen finds food and looks for a good location for a nest.
A few years later, however, they were nowhere to be seen. And soon they had also disappeared from the coastal cliffs covered in wild flowers that Montalava visited every year for the annual survey.
The cause of the catastrophe was eventually identified, in the form of a creature far smaller than the golden giant. Each year more than 2 million bumblebee colonies are exported from factories in Europe to greenhouses in more than 60 countries.
These industrial bumblebees are bred and sold for their fantastic pollination skills: their plump, hairy bodies are perfect to shake the pollen of the male part of the plant to the female. Around the world the industrial bees travel, pollinating fruits and vegetables, including tomatoes, aubergines, peppers and blueberries. But the growth of the bumblebee trade for agricultural pollination since the s has been identified as one of the top emerging environmental issues likely to affect global diversity.
Since , Chile has imported more than 1. In alone, , were imported. Over the years, they have escaped the greenhouses and spread more than 2,km 1, miles to the southernmost tip of South America, across the Andes into Argentina and from the Pacific to the Atlantic coast.
The most widely exported European bumblebee is the buff-tailed bumblebee Bombus terrestris. But this highly adaptable bumblebee can wreak havoc on non-native ecosystems.
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