Researchers have made a new discovery. Bumblebee queens can survive for up to a week after being submerged in water. Queen Bumblebees have a lot of work cut out for them. First, she has to survive the winter by hibernating alone in the soil. This makes her vulnerable to weather conditions such as floods. She has to survive to be able to start her colony in the spring. Queen Bumblebees have a lot of work cut out for them. First, she has to survive the winter by hibernating alone in the soil. This makes her vulnerable to weather conditions such as floods. She has to survive to be able to start her colony in the spring. 

Bee biologists Sabrina Rondeau and Nigel Raine have been studying how hibernating queens respond to pesticide exposure. While conducting their experiments at the University of Guelph in Canada, condensation from the refrigerator that was storing the bees in Raine’s lab accidentally caused four of the vitals that were housing queen bees to flood. 

After finding out that the vitals had flooded, the pair of researchers were concerned. In an article published by “Biology Letters,”  Rondeau, who now works at the University of Ottawa, stated that “I was very concerned at first. I thought, of course, they were dead.” But the queens were very much alive. She stated that they had started fidgeting after being picked up out of the water with forceps.

After seeing that the bees were indeed still alive, the pair decided to start testing more on how waterproof queen bumblebees are. According to ScienceNews.com, “Rondeau and Raine decided to test more rigorously just how waterproof bumblebee queens are. They gathered 143 common eastern bumblebee queens left over from another experiment. Seventeen queens served as controls and weren’t submerged in the water’s surface for either eight hours, 24 hours, or one week. All the bees were housed in individual vials and stored at cold hibernation temperatures.”

The storage and housing of the bees were meant to mimic a real-world flooding scenario, where a hibernation chamber in the soil could potentially be filled with water or partially submerged. ScienceNews.com states that it is rare to observe bumble bees over winter. But, generally, queens have been found in sloped ground and sandy soil. They also stated that “it turned out that four queens who survived accidental fridge flooding were hardly outliers. Of the 21 queens that were submerged for seven days and then allowed to resume hibernating, 17 were still alive eight weeks after their aquatic ordeal. This rate of survival was not statistically different from that of the 17 bees that were never submerged; 15 of them survived to eight weeks.”

Rondeau stated that after pulling the first queen out of submersion, it was like a bee that would be fished out of a swimming pool but after a day. It became as if they were fluffy again. The researchers still have so many questions on how the queen manages to survive being underwater for so long. But they will be continuing their research on how the bees survive in water for so long.