Long Live the Queen

Not far down the trail behind my house are patches of native grasses in assorted hues of winter straw. The Broomsedge is a buttery yellow, the Little Bluestem has a hint of orange thrown in. When the sun gets low, they both put on orange raiment with tone determined by some trigonometry of observation angle and position of the sun that I don’t care to understand. What catches my eye is the tangled tussock of withering straw at the base of each clump. Tidy gardeners call this kind of thing a mess that needs to be dealt with. Would-be bumblebee queens call it a winter refuge for the founder of a colony of hundreds.

At the end of last summer, the reproductive female bumblebees called gynes (from the same Greek root as words like gynecology and misogyny) built up some fat reserves and found spots like the base of this bluestem to wait for spring. No one else from their colony, including their queen mother, survived the winter. It’s fun to picture these bees cuddled up under a blanket in this tuft of grass, safe from hungry birds, howling winds, and heavy snow. The real image of her diapause (hibernation) is that she produced glycol as antifreeze in her hemolymph (blood), crawled a few centimeters into the dirt under this grass, and shut off. The cozy bed and nightcap image, like a scene out of a Frog and Toad story, is more romantic. If you can’t keep that whimsical notion and the stark reality of chemical-induced diapause in your head at the same time, give it some practice. It gives nature walks a soothing dimension outside of the textbook.

Our little friend will emerge a few weeks from now, hungry for nectar and colonization. The Wild Geraniums, violets, Prickly Ash, and other spring ephemerals will feed her belly. Her tiny brain will tell her to fly low over the landscape, looking for a suitable nest site. At the base of a rotting log, she spies an old rodent burrow. Some young milksnakes have just slithered out into their second summer and the hole is once again on the market. The queen claims the real estate and a colony is born.

She’ll be busy for a while, gathering stores of nectar and laying eggs. She’ll gorge on the Wild Indigo to give herself the energy to go back and shiver to keep her brood warm on a frigid spring night. The nest will be as warm as a sunny summer day when the grass above is frosted, all from the heat of our queen’s vibrating body.

One of those forays out to the flowers will be the last flight she need ever take. The workers in her brood will assume the grocery-getting duties, and the queen will remain in the nest, tending her offspring.

The workers are the bumblebees of summer. Fields and gardens and hedgerows are literally abuzz with their foraging when the weather is anything calmer than a hurricane. They’ll visit any flower, but have some clear favorites. Wild Senna is one that bumblebees love and appears to produce nectar that is particularly nutritious for their needs. A big senna plant will hum with the buzz of as many as forty bumblebees on a summer afternoon.

Back in the nest, the queen receives the nourishment harvested by the workers. She needs it to produce gynes that will leave to find their own way in the world. Next year’s queens, should they survive nature’s tooth and claw.

Once her daughters are gone, the queen’s work is done. Countless plants have been pollinated by her colony. Birds have fed their young with her offspring. A little girl watched a worker gathering nectar on a coneflower. Enthralled and inspired, that very night she convinced her parents not to spray the yard with pesticide.

Missions accomplished.

The queen will not produce antifreeze this fall. On a particularly chilly night in October, no longer eating and no longer needed, she succumbs to cold and starvation. Bacteria quickly make compost of her innards. A salamander crawls into its new winter abode and unceremoniously falls asleep on the shell of our queen’s body. The roots of a Sugar Maple sapling pierce the burrow, the fungal hyphae gathering up what nutrients are left that had once been a bumblebee. Someday that tree will tower above the memory of a queen’s domain - and a little girl will share some fresh maple syrup with her own daughters.

Missions accomplished, queen bee. Accomplished and unending.