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Rearing bumblebee colonies in captivity has a long history (the earli-
est record that I was able to find was of a Bombus queen being persuaded
to lay eggs in a cage in Graz in the nineteenth century), and is especi-
ally associated with the names of F.W.L. Sladen (1912) and J.B. Free
(1959) in Britain, with Peter-Frank Roeseler and his students in Germany
and with our group in Canada (1960's to the present). I have never
found it difficult to get bumblebee colonies started for research purp-
oses (although rearing them on a commercial scale is something else
again), but I have been widely criticized for my inability to communi-
cate my techniques to other people. This got to be such a problem in
the 1970's that I eventually threw up my hands and told people: "Look,
if you want to learn how to rear bumblebees, then just come and spend
time in my lab so that my students and I can show you how it's done!".
Some very distinguished alumni graduated from this "apprenticeship
program", one of whom (Sydney Cameron) went so far as to write a manual
summarizing the methods that she had learnt.
Rearing bumblebees, in my view, has never (as some have claimed) been
"more of an art than a science", but to be successful you either have to
have an "idiot-proof-know-nothing" system (which is, of course, the way
that the commercial bumblebee rearing companies do it), or you have to
accumulate an adequate body of knowledge on the details of Bombus repro-
ductive biology. The latter has been my own preferred course of action,
and I usually recommend to people that they start with that marvellous
book that can still be found in some university libraries (I heard that
it either had been, or soon will be, reprinted by somebody in the U.K.):
"The Humble Bee: its Life History, and how to Domesticate it", by Sladen
published by MacMillan in 1912. Nobody, but NOBODY, has ever written
about bumble bees with such love and engaging charm as F.W.L. Sladen(*).
If you study his book carefully, and then use one of the published
methods for rearing bumblebee colonies (e.g. the paper that Cam Jay and
I put in Journal of Apicultural Research in 1966), then you should be
able to achieve some success (but make sure that you use only "fresh-
frozen" pollen!).
Rearing colonies from queens in captivity is not the only way to
obtain bumblebee colonies: Sladen's book also introduced the idea of
attracting wild nest-searching Bombus queens to artificial domiciles, in
which they start their own colonies in a natural way. Domicile techniq-
ues were developed for large-scale use by Gordon Hobbs and Ken Richards
in Canada. My students and I have found that if you put enough care
into placing underground domiciles in banks in the early spring, you can
often achieve success rates approaching or equalling 100%.
Domicile methods can only be used in the field during the spring of
the year, when wild queens that have emerged from natural hibernation
are searching for nest sites. This imposes a major constraint on the
usefulness of the resulting colonies, which are generally too small to
be useful for pollinating all field crops except those that bloom in
late summer. To arrange for the blooming of the crop to coincide with
the maximum size of the colony, one must start colonies much earlier in
the season: this means using either queens that have been caught else-
where, or those that have been hibernated artificially (or induced to
start colonies without a prior overwintering period).
Best regards, Chris Plowright.
(*) Sladen was also well-known (earlier in his life) for his "Golden
Queens". He emigrated to Canada (there is a wonderful photograph of his
magnificent bearded face, together with Comstock and Wheeler, attending
a meeting of the Entomolological Society of Ontario) where he became our
first "Dominion Apiarist". He was tragically drowned in a canoeing
accident in Lake Erie.
--
Chris Plowright - via the University of Ottawa
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