Review of Bee Health

USDA Scientists: The Keystone of American Agriculture

February 7, 2017

Bumblebees Are Dying Out Because They’re Too Fat to Mate

Scientists are working hard to slim them down.

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Some of the most insightful research into the parasite is done in northern Utah, in the lab of James Strange, a research entomologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Lately, Strange has studied a close relative of the rusty-patched bumblebee, the Western bumblebee, rearing colonies in his lab, exhausting himself to get them healthy, then infecting them with a parasite that bloats male bees until they’re impotent.

A queen bumblebee can birth males—called drones—on her own. But only after a male fertilizes her eggs can she produce female bees. This is crucial, because drones are essentially layabouts. It’s the women, the worker bees, that do all the foraging to sustain a colony. So inside a mating cage, Strange places a queen bumblebee, and on the other side a drone infected with Nosema bombi. Already this fungus has spreads down the bee’s throat, has rooted itself in the gut where the spores “proliferate like crazy,” according to Strange.

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USDA Scientists: The Keystone of American Agriculture

Bumblebees Are Dying Out Because They’re Too Fat to Mate

Scientists are working hard to slim them down.

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