GoKawiilBumblebee Queens Breathe Underwater to Survive Drowning, Revealing How They Can Live Submerged for a Week After scientists accidentally discovered that the common eastern bumblebee can withstand flood conditions, they wanted to investigate what makes that super-ability possible Andrea Lius Get our newsletter! Get our newsletter!
You may not think of bees as underground animals. But more than 80 percent of bee species, including many bumblebees, actually nest in the ground—and there, they are vulnerable to being submerged in water.
Bumblebees’ life cycles are in tune with seasonal changes. The insects are most active in summer. By late fall, the majority of the colony—the female workers, the male drones and the old queen—has died off. New queens spend the winter in the soil “diapausing,” the insect version of hibernating, during which they conserve energy so they can start new colonies come spring.
But as these bees wait out the winter, they can face serious threats. Snow may melt and rain may fall, saturating the soil with water and putting the queens at risk of drowning. For this reason, “insects that diapause in the soil must be prepared to be covered in water,” says Elizabeth Crone, an ecologist at the University of California, Davis.
A serendipitous 2024 discovery revealed that bumblebee queens can withstand submersion in water for up to a week. But scientists didn’t understand exactly how the insects were able to survive. Now, in a study published yesterday in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, they’ve begun to uncover the answer. It turns out that the diapausing bumblebee queens are actually breathing underwater.
That wouldn’t be a big deal for many aquatic insects, such as diving beetles. “But bumblebees are not considered aquatic insects, so that’s a very cool finding,” says Jon Harrison, an environmental physiologist at Arizona State University who was not involved in the work. “You wouldn’t really have expected that.”
A silver lining in a lab fridge mishap
A few years ago, conservation biologist Sabrina Rondeau, then at Canada’s University of Guelph, was studying how pesticide residues in soil affect common eastern bumblebees (Bombus impatiens) during diapause. To simulate winter conditions, Rondeau was keeping bumblebee queens in soil-filled tubes in a laboratory fridge.
All was well until she opened the fridge one day to find that some tubes had accidentally become filled with water due to condensation, completely submerging the queens. Rondeau was sure that the bees were dead. But to her surprise, they started moving soon after she removed them from the water.
Quick facts: Bumblebees at risk The rusty patched bumblebee (Bombus affinis) became the first bumblebee to be declared endangered in the United States, in 2017.
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