Q: Honey bees in the ground
I recently relocated my bee yard, and I noticed a lot of bee activity near the old location. Assuming they were displaced or lost bees, I put a nuc box near the location to collect the lost bees. After five days, I noticed the bee activity did not decrease. I found the bees coming and going from the ground by the old bee stand. [What might be happening?]
Christy Lalumia
Florida, April
With her question, Christy provided a video in which she asks about why bees are flying around the ground and landing at the foot of the old hive stand. She originally moved a colony about 20 yards (18.3 m) from one hive stand to a second one. In the video, bees were returning to the base of the old hive stand and were flying around this location five days after she moved the bees. She wanted to know if bees nest in the ground. Upon a second email from Christy, I found out the bees were not nesting in the ground. Christy wanted to know my thoughts on all of this.
Answer
I think this all has to do with bee confusion. I have written at least twice in this column about the “3 feet / 3 miles” (0.9 m / 4.8 km) adage in beekeeping. The idea is that you move a colony either three feet or three miles if you plan to move it. The thinking goes like this: Moving a hive only three feet has minimal impact on the colony. While the flying bees may be confused initially, it is only temporary confusion since their hive (with its odors and all) is near its original site. If you plan to move your bees farther than this, you need to move them three or more miles away from the original site. Otherwise, the bees will fly back to their original nest site and die of exposure. There are variations of the “3 feet / 3 mile” saying, but they are all based on the same premise: Move a hive very short distances or move them beyond their standard flight distance to avoid any confusion with foraging bees.
You moved your colonies only about 20 yards from their original hive stand. As a result, you had confused bees returning to the original nest site looking for their hive. This is perfectly normal confusion. Since you have other colonies in the same apiary, it should not be a problem for these bees. They will ultimately drift into those colonies, with no great risk to themselves. When I move colonies short distances within one apiary, I completely remove the original hive stand. Even in the absence of the hive, the stand remains a visual, and likely odor, cue for bees whose colony was moved. I have seen confused bees return to the stand, land on it, and sit in place until they die. I attempt to stop this by removing everything from the location housing the original hive. The bees you saw were just confused. Hopefully, they have all dissipated and integrated into neighboring hives.
Now, I will note that honey bees can, and do, nest in the ground. We generally speak about Apis mellifera (the western honey bee – what we all usually mean when we say “honey bee” — though there are eleven other species of Apis) as if it is a tree-cavity nesting species. Yet, this bee regularly nests in the ground in areas where tree cavities are infrequent. We know so little about their utilization of ground nests. While in your example, the bees were simply confused and returning to the base of the stand on which their original hive stood, honey bees are still perfectly capable of nesting in the ground. See this recent publication from my Ph.D. student (Kaylin Kleckner) and our collaborators on ground-nesting honey bees in Africa:
Kleckner, K., Mdiza, W., Hill, M., Ellis, J.D. 2026. Wild honey bee ground nests are prevalent yet frequently vacated in the Eastern Cape, South Africa. Journal of Insect Conservation, 30, 12. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10841-026-00749-0.
Q: What about bumble bees?
I have a pollination contract with a company that has hot houses for which they rent bumble bees. [The bees are used] indoors and my [honey] bees cannot help throughout the winter. Who or where would be a good resource to go to for information on breeding for that type of business or research instead of honey beekeeping?
Ray Johnson
New Jersey, May
Answer
Wow. There is a lot to unpack here. Bumble bees (bees from the genus Bombus) have a native range that includes North America, a continent that is home to over 40 species of these bees. The natural history of bumble bees varies among species but follows the same general order. A queen bumble bee overwinters as a solitary bee in the ground, thick piles of grass/leaf litter, rotten wood, etc. She emerges from her hibernation location in early spring. Following this, she finds a nest location — for example, an old mouse burrow — builds wax cells, lays eggs, forages, and provisions her young with pollen pellets moistened with nectar. Once the first round of adult worker offspring emerges from the cells, the queen remains behind in the nest where she continues to lay eggs. The workers, then, take over the nest construction, foraging, and brood-rearing activities. The colony grows throughout spring, peaking in summer, and then declines in population in late summer. Colonies typically produce drones and new queens in late summer/early fall. Mated queens find locations to overwinter in late fall, with the colony from which they originated dying before winter arrives. This cycle repeats itself ad infinitum.
Entrepreneurial individuals developed a way to mass-rear bumble bee colonies, leading to the growth of companies from which you can purchase them. There is a lot of work involved, not to mention the industry trade secrets one would need to know to mass-rear bumble bee colonies successfully. I searched “bumble bee rearing” in Google Scholar and found a couple of options that I think will appeal to you:
Sharma, H.K., Devi, D., Thakur, M. et al. Bumble bees in vitro rearing methods – a review. International Journal of Tropical Insect Science, 1045–1057 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42690-021-00675-5.
Rowe, G., Hadadorn, M.A., Lindsay, T-T. T., et al. 2022. Chapter 20 – Production of bumblebees (Hymenoptera: Apidae) for pollination research. In: Mass Production of Beneficial Organisms (Second Edition, Eds: J.A. Morales-Ramos, M.G. Rojas, D.I. Shapiro-Ilan), 559 – 579. Academic Press. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-822106-8.00004-X.
There are, of course, other articles on rearing bumble bees. I feel that the first one is a good start as it is a review of this topic and it could point you to other resources as well. That said, it would be a hard business to start. It is not as easy to work with bumble bees as it is with honey bees. There are nuances. The colonies do not live as long. They do not grow as large. Some of what you know about honey bees would translate over to bumble bees, but you would need to learn mostly from scratch.
Why bumble bees? Ample research has shown that bumble bees are often better pollinations on a bee-to-bee basis than honey bees. They seem to get up earlier in the morning, forage in conditions in which honey bees do not forage, buzz pollinate (which is useful for some types of flowers), and forage in confined spaces, just like the greenhouse you referenced in your question. Growers of certain crops like to purchase bumble bee colonies for pollination or even “pollination insurance” (i.e., to have bees present when the honey bees are not doing their job). Why, then, use honey bees at all? They are more manageable and make much bigger colonies than do bumble bees. Long story short, there is a lot to learn if you plan to jump into the bumble bee world. It is very rewarding, but it does have a learning curve associated with it …
