Ask Your Question today
I love bees, although I am afraid of them and have never had any real interaction with them other than being stung once. I want to pet bumble bees because they are very docile. Is this normal?
Plant lots of flowers then in the summer find tired ones and give them a spoonful of sugar water and sometimes you can gently stroke them. They don’t all like it though so respect them.
When I was a kid I froze one in a freezer for little bit, then tied a string to its body.
I heated it with a hair dryer and it woke up, so I flew it around like a kite.
I petted a honeybee as a kid and got stung for the first time. Never done it since.
Being stung by a bumblebee would be worse. They don’t die after stinging like a honeybee does; their stingers are smooth, they don’t have the backwards facing barbs that cause a honeybee’s stinger to become stuck and tear off (to continue pumping in venom even after the honeybee dies). Bumblebee would sting you as much as it feels like.
Bumblebees are generally more docile - or at least less defensive than honeybees and less aggressive than members of the wasp family - but as you know from experience, they do have a stinger and they will react if they perceive a threat. Some species are more defensive than others, and some are touchy enough to go for people who happen to wander close to one of their nests.
You do occasionally come across dozy-looking bumblebees just hanging out on a leaf or whatever. This is most likely to happen on a cool morning. If a bee makes a miscalculation when she's foraging late in the day and she doesn't make it back her hive before it gets dark and the temperature falls, she can become too chilled to fly. If she's not actually at the end of her natural lifespan, in a place where the sun can warm her the next morning and there's sufficient nectar in her crop to give her enough energy to fly, she'll eventually take off and carry on with her normal routine.
If you really want to touch a bumblebee, it would be pretty safe to do so when one was in that state. I haven't ever stroked a lethargic bumblebee with my finger, but I have touched them with a blade of grass just to see what response I got. They usually do this quite cute thing where they raise one of their forelegs as if they're trying to push you away or maybe give you the finger.
Like all bees and wasps, bumblebees can only sting if their underside is facing toward their target and they can grip it firmly enough to have the leverage necessary to push their stinger in. So lightly touching a bumblebee on her upper side is unlikely to result in a sting if she isn't lively enough to be able to flip over and grab your finger. In any case, if you're not allergic, a bee-sting is unpleasant but far from a major trauma.
If you come across a dozy bumblebee, you could try feeding it. Dissolve some sugar in a teaspoonful of water, and try to put a drop of this in front of her. If she's sufficiently awake to notice it, she'll probably extend her ridiculously long tongue to lap it up.
When I was a child in Hounslow, West London we had massive natural hive under our wooden shed. They were huge fluffy Bumblebees, they assumed we were past of the furniture and used to land on us all the time to pick up a bit of salt. My junior school was dead across the road and I was often asked to go to a class and help remove one of "your" bees that was scaring the other kids, I always got the bee ouy, often on my arm.
Beehives are the boxes used by beekeepers to house honeybees; bumblebees live in nests in the ground, in trees and sometimes in attics or other manmade cavities. Beekeepers don't keep bumblebees because they don't produce significant amounts of honey. If you knock over a beehive, you're a dickhead, you deserve whatever you get and I'd shed no tears on your behalf if you died of anaphylactic shock after being stung. If you believe you're being chased by bumblebees after performing this act of assholery, you're not merely a dickhead, but a particularly ignorant dickhead.