It’s not easy being a queen — a bumblebee queen, that is. To start her colony in the spring, an expectant queen must first survive the winter by hibernating alone in the soil, where she’s vulnerable to hazards like floods.
It turns out these bee queens are royally up to the task. In a serendipitous discovery, researchers have found that hibernating bumblebee queens can survive being submerged in water for up to a week.
Bee biologists Sabrina Rondeau and Nigel Raine were studying how hibernating queens respond to pesticide exposure (SN: 3/29/12). Condensation in the refrigerator storing the dormant bees in Raine’s lab at the University of Guelph in Canada accidentally caused four of the vials housing queens to flood, the pair describe April 17 in Biology Letters.