Hello, this is wild suzhou.
Today, we will be talking about bumblebees, which include any of over 250 species of bees from the genus bombus. Their name and the name of their genus means that they make buzzing or humming sounds. These bees are usually found in the Northern Hemisphere, though some species can be found in South America.
Though there are over 250 species of bumblebees, they are generally plump insects and also very fuzzy, with dense hairs covering their body. They are more stocky and broad than a typical honeybee. Many species of bumblebees have a few bands of color like black, yellow, pink, white, orange, and red, and different species can be told apart from the patterns on their bodies. These colors and patterns are known as aposematism, and are a warning to predators that the females can sting them. They have longer tongues than honeybees, which is important because honeybees can only pollinate certain types of flowers, while bumblebees are able to pollinate other kinds.
Like most species of bees, honeybees are also able to sting animals or humans that threaten them. However, their stinger works differently to a honeybees. Honeybees have stingers with barbs on them. Think of a harpoon, or fishing spear. When you strike the fish with the spear, small spikes on it hook on to the fish, making the harpoon more difficult to pull out. The same is true with honeybees. When they sting a predator, the barbs on the stinger make sure the stinger stays pushed into the skin. However, this means the stinger is pulled out of the honeybee, killing it. Bumblebees don’t have barbed stingers, meaning that they can sting predators multiple times without hurting themselves. However, bumblebees are not very aggressive, and do not sting often.
Like honeybees, bumblebees feed on the nectar of flowers. They use color and a basic understanding of the space around them to figure out which flowers have nectar and which ones have already been pollinated. Bumblebees also do something called nectar robbing, which is when a bee, instead of going into a flower normally to get pollen and nectar, it instead bites a hole into a flower to access nectar directly. Some bumblebees will do this because their tongues are not long enough to reach into the flower to get nectar. This isn’t as good for the flower because it does not get pollinated.
For Wild Suzhou, I’m Ciana, thanks for listening and see you next time.