Bumblebees: the chubby, fuzzy cousins of the bee species. These amusing harbingers of spring are much friendlier than their relatives — the wasps — and are the most social members of their species. Join us as we take a closer look at their behavior, understand their biology, experience their unique abilities and marvel at their survival techniques. Compared with honeybees, these social insects have been poorly researched, although they’re at home in temperate regions throughout the Northern Hemisphere and South America. A few tropical species form colonies that last several years, but elsewhere only the summer’s new queens survive into the next spring. So the colonies remain small — typically about 50 to 500 individuals — and there is no need to store honey for hibernation, a fact that has kept honey-loving gourmets like us away from their often underground nests.
