This beautiful and important bumblebee is the star in the Bee City Los Alamos logo!
If you’ve been paying attention to the bumblebees in your garden you have probably already seen a Hunt’s bumblebee at some point. Hunt’s bumblebees are common for our area and are quite distinct with an orange band around a yellow body. They are generalists in their plant nectar selections and will nectar at a variety of different plants growing in our area. The Hunt’s Bumblebee can be found in many different habitats, including prairies, scrubby desert areas, meadows, along roadsides, in gardens, and along streams. This species has experienced declines, but it is still one of the more common bees of western North America.
A fuzzy Hunt’s bumblebee on a sunflower | Bombus huntii
The Hunt’s bumblebee is a social insect, with a caste system of a queen and workers. The queen reproduces young and the workers raise the young and find food. This is similar to the social structure of honeybees. However, bumblebees have an annual life cycle, in which only the newly emerged fertilized queens survive the winter by hibernating underground (unlike honeybees who live for multiple years). In the spring, the queens emerge and search for a suitable nest site. The queens then lay eggs and rear the first batch of workers, who take over the tasks of foraging, nest maintenance, and brood care. The colony grows throughout the summer, producing more workers and eventually males and new queens. The males and new queens mate, and the old queen and workers die by the end of the season leaving only the new queen and her developing eggs to carry on the population.
The Hunt’s bumblebee is an important pollinator, commonly interacting with plants, such as yarrow, milkvetch, fireweed, purple prairie clover, cinquefoil, prairie sunflower, hairy golden aster, silky lupine, wild bergamot, goldenrods, western snowberry, and aster. They are also good pollinators of crop plants such as raspberries and tomatoes. However, the development of using them for commercial pollination of crops, poses a threat because this process can lead to the introduction of diseases, such as the deformed wing virus. They are also threatened by pesticides, habitat destruction, and lack of floral resources and nesting locations.
Photo and Profile by Dana Ecelberger