From: [log in to unmask] Dear Bee-Liners: After such scholarly contributions about the spread of the European honeybee in the New World, it was a bit disappointing to read David Inouye's message about bumblebee honey. Here are some corrections: > Bumblebees, which are native to the US, also produce some honey. > But usually not more than enough to get the annual colony through a > few days of bad weather. This completely ignores the tremendous "warehousing potential" of a large Bombus colony as it enters into the phase of queen-production. A large colony of B. impatiens (or B. vosnesenskii) for example, may have as much as a kilogram or two of honey stored in its comb at this time. > It tastes good, but is more dilute than honeybee honey, and is > stored in the open, leftover cases where bees pupated (except for > the initial honeypot made by the queen when she is starting the > colony). As in the case of honeybees, it is only the more recently collected honey that is dilute. Bumblebee honey that has been in the "warehouse" for a longer time becomes as concentrated as honeybee honey (measure it if you don't believe me), and the empty cocoons which contain it are frequently sealed ("capped"). Also, it is incorrect to say that the only alternative to empty cocoons is the "initial honeypot" made by the queen: depending upon their economic circumstances, all bumblebee colonies will, if they have a generous intake of nectar, construct wax honeypots around the comb (this is taken to ridiculous extremes, for example, in laboratory or greenhouse colonies fed with ad libitum sugar solution). Also, not all foundress queens construct only a single wax honeypot: B. griseocollis, for example, in eastern N. America (and in the mid-west also, Sydney Cameron?) regularly build two or three honeypots and, as is not usually the case among Bombus species, they start building them well before they lay their first-brood eggs! > I doubt that Native Americans would have looked for bumblebee nests > as a source of this resource. Well, I'm sorry to be insulting, but I suspect that many Native Americ- ans were (and doubtless still ARE!) better naturalists than some academ- ic "ecologists"! After all, during the month of August (in the northern hemisphere), kids all over (native and otherwise) have regularly tested their bravery, year after year, by waging war on their local Bombus factory-fortresses . . . Truly, the warehousing dynamics of a Bombus hive are a fascinating study in social insect adaptability--we have only recently begun to appreciate, for example, how exquisitely fine-tuned are the "optimality tradeoffs" involved in balancing the complementary resources (honey and pollen) required by a bumblebee colony. Best regards, Chris Plowright. -- Chris Plowright - via the University of Ottawa Return addresses: via INTERNET: [log in to unmask] via UUCP : ...uunet!mitel!cunews!csi2!uplow!chris