Bumblebee Queens Can Breathe Underwater For Up To a Week
- 2 hours ago
- 2 min read
Most people don't 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.
Bumblebee queens, as we all now, have an important job. Typically the only one of their kind in a nest, they’re in charge of laying eggs in the spring to populate their colonies - and in order to do that, they often need to survive in soaked soil from rain and melted snow as they live underground during winter. In a recent study, scientists discovered how queen bees may do this: They can live submerged in water for at least a week by breathing underwater.
Their winter sojourn in the soil is called “diapausing,” the insect version of hibernating, during which they conserve energy so they can start new colonies when Spring comes along. 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.
Now, a new study has helped unravel how they survive. It turns out that the diapausing bumblebee queens are actually breathing underwater.
This dates back to 2024 when researchers found that after submerging queen bees in tubes filled with water and soil and keeping them in a lab fridge for one week, around 9 out of 10 survived. How? To find out, the new study involved submerging queens in water for eight days, and then analyzing the H2O. The results? They learned that the bees had survived in part by extracting oxygen from the water and releasing carbon dioxide - a technique used by aquatic insects. “To my knowledge, this is the first study that shows a terrestrial insect like a bumblebee being able to get their oxygen out of water,” environmental physiologist Jon Harrison told Smithsonian Magazine.
But that's not all. The team found that the bees also likely avoided drowning by both dropping their metabolic rates and employing anaerobic metabolism, a process that produces lactate to fuel cells when oxygen isn’t present. “To me, the whole combination of strategies is the most fascinating aspect of this study,” said study co-author Charles Darveau.
