Answers to Go
Q. Are bumble bees and honey bees the same? What’s the difference? How can I learn more about bees?
While the bumblebee and A. honeybee species both belong to the Apidae family, bumblebees belong to the Bombus genus and honeybees to Apis. They look different, too. Bumblebees are larger and rounder and appear as just one “piece” while honey bees are smaller, thinner and have a clear distinction between their head and abdomen. They can often be confused with a wasp. Honeybees also have two distinct sets of wings.
There are differences in their pollinating habits as well. There are more species of bumblebees with various tongue lengths that can access pollen in various flowers. Also, because they have larger bodies than honeybees, they can carry more pollen. All these things make them better pollinators than honeybees.
There are more differences, too. Bumblebee colonies are short lived since they are annual and die out at the end of summer and bumblebee colonies never grow larger than about 250 individuals, while a honeybee colony can have up to 50,000 bees. Like honeybees, bumblebees both have a body of female worker bees and a lone queen who lays all the eggs. Both colonies also have a large contingent of male drone bees that gather pollen. Each spring, because their colonies die out at the end of summer, the queen bumblebee must start a colony from scratch, while the honeybee queen will have a contingent of worker bees with which to start. The more worker bees the queen produces for both bumblebee colonies and honeybee colonies, the more eggs she can lay for even more worker bees. Worker bee sizes can vary because it depends on how much food they receive during their development. Also, the difference in their size is also thought to be because they have different work that they do. Larger workers do most of the foraging while smaller bees stay in the nest more. The big workers are able to collect more food, fly in colder temperatures and evade more predators such as birds and other insects. The smaller workers seem to stay in the nest more. However, these are just observations — we are still not sure how worker size really relates to worker “duties” in the colony.
So — do bumblebees make honey like honeybees? The answer is no, not really, but they do collect nectar to store and feed the colony. This stored food allows the queen the opportunity to stay in the nest and care for the newly hatched baby bees. The reason the stored nectar is not considered “honey” like the honeybees is because it is not dehydrated. Bumblebees do not lower the water content in their nectar like honeybees do. Also, since bumblebee nests are considerably smaller than honeybee nests and they don’t last the winter, they don’t store honey like honeybees do.
The library has a variety of resources for people interested in bees. There are books that help people who are interested in keeping bees for honey, like “The Idle Beekeeper: The Low-effort, Natural Way to Raise Bees” by Bill Anderson. For those who are interested in bees in general, “Bees: A Natural History” by Christopher O’Toole and for those who are interested in sustaining bees in our environment, “Saving the Bees with Natural Backyard Hives” by Bob and Chelsea McFarland. The library has DVDs about bees, including “Bees: Tales from the Hive and Vanishing of the Bees” and the magazine “American Bee Journal.”
Suzanne Sanders is the new columnist for the library. She is the Community Services Manager for the San Marcos Public Library and came from the Austin Public Library in 2015 after having served there as a librarian for over 20 years. She gratefully accepts your questions for this column.
