![]() ![]() In fact, some of our earliest hives are still going strong over a decade later, and led by great, great, great granddaughter queens of the original queen. Barring disaster, they are a perennial colony that can occupy the same hive for generations, and years on end. Honey bees form enormous colonies with seasonal populations that range from maybe 10,000 bees in winter, through to 60,000 bees or more in summer. Well, aside from the obvious visual differences…. ![]() Ok, first things first – what’s the difference between honey bees and bumble bees? ![]() There are about three other species here in NZ, but they all follow similar enough life cycles to terrestris). (Bit of a disclaimer – I’m generally talking about bombus terrestris, which is our most common bumble bee here. If you’d like a bit of a fuller explanation, read on. It is always possible that someone may have found a bee or bees that have been poisoned, either inadvertently or deliberately, but the probability is that this is just their natural die off. Please do not feed them – check out my previous post on why it’s a bad idea to feed bees for more info on that: …/a.423002691452…/707077053045555/…. the last of the bumble bee nests are dying off because they’ve reached the end of their life cycle and it is, quite simply, their time to die. Bumble bee nests are a short lived entity, and right now. To make a long story short: don’t panic, there’s no bee-pocalypse going on. I’ve worked with honeybees for over a decade, but in the last couple of years I’ve really enjoyed getting to work with bumble bees too, raising several hundred colonies, so I thought I’d weigh in and hopefully put some minds to rest. They are wondering whether the bees are starving and need to be fed, or whether they have been poisoned. There have been quite a few posts around the gardening and beekeeping groups on Facebook over the last couple of weeks, where people are concerned at seeing dying bumble bees around lately, sometimes in large numbers. ![]()
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