Husband bought me a bumble box for my birthday which I carefully sited in a dry stone wall and duly caparisoned with a mouse nest. I have absolutely NO expectation of it ever being occupied but I'll check it every spring in hope.
I posted this on another thread,
The queen is much larger than her workers and they in turn are of different sizes. Some researchers think that this size variation reflects their role in the colony. 30% of the worker bees show no specialised function and some workers rather than becoming foragers, never leave the nest at all, but all can change their roles if emergency factors deem it necessary.
When the colony has reached its critical point in the early summer its dynamics change to producing the “next generation”. There is considerable overlap though with males,queens and workers being produced at the same time and unlike in the honey bee the B terrestris queen can largely control the production of daughter queens and she can delay their appearance by making large workers. The more workers there are the less the new queens have to risk their lives foraging to fatten up for hibernation.
Some nests never reach this reproductive phase and some go on to produce only males or only new queens.
Unlike the honeybee too eggs destined as future queens spend longer than workers in the pupal stage
You cannot really see any of this without breaking up the nest, Suffice to say that worker/drone/queen cells all look similar except in size.
Queen and drone rearing starts within a month of the first workers eggs being laid. The Bumblebee season is indeed a short one.
Drones leave the nest to forage on their own and to mate. They never return. Queens remain after mating and will often help tend the nest.
The new queens will find a place to hibernate, the old queen dies or in her decrepitude is evicted by the workers and some of them may go on to produce their own male offspring but soon the colony disintegrates and dies out. The males continue to forage outside the nest well into the autumn, these e are the large slow Bumbles you see asleep on flowers. When food disappears they die.
