The Friday Fillip

Some people like bees, some people don’t. I’m in the former camp. Don’t know why. I just find them, their industry, colour, smarts, appealing. (Wasps and hornets are another matter: see Wikipedia to learn how to differentiate them from bees.) And of the bees, I’m partial to the big fuzzy bumblebees.

What got me musing about bees in mid-winter was an article in the Guardian recently that talked about an alarming 96% drop in the numbers of four bumblebee species in the U.S. Like their honey bee cousins, Bombus — the genus name means “booming” in Latin — is a very important pollinator. All bees pollinate something like 90% of the world’s commercial plants, so the general decline of bee populations is a real worry. Bumblebees have long tongues, lots of hair, and buzz at a high frequency, all of which makes them good at pollinating certain plants such as tomatoes and berries, among others.

And, yes, bumblebees can fly. The canard that they’re too heavy to fly apparently got started in Germany in the thirties. Seems the problem was treating bumblebee wings as if they were equivalent to stationary wings of an aircraft, when in fact they’re more like “reverse-pitch semirotary helicopter blades,” which generate a lot more lift. Their wings vibrate at an incredible 200 beats per second — which is even faster than Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumblebee.”

Good old Bombus is a citizen of the world, another feature that appeals to me. Though, she hums in a bewildering variety of accents, as it were. There are, it seems, 15 subgenera yielding a staggering 255 species worldwide. You could come to love these bouffant buzzers from some of the species names alone: B. senex, B. festivus, B. perplexus, B. hypocrita… And there’s a significant Canadian connection: the lovely pictured at the top of this post is a B. polaris, who lives as far north as Ellesmere Island.

So as the days get longer and while the bumblebee queens are hibernating alone (only she overwinters), imagine the buzz, the drone of summer. And thank the bee.