small queens around

Although we are now just seeing the first workers of early and buff-tailed bumblebee, there have been some surprsingly small queens of early bumblebee and common carder bee around. The behaviour was typical of other 'normal' sized queens, with foraging interspersed with nest searching activity. There is always quite a bit of variation, and Murdo Macdonald of the Highland Biological Recording Group tells me that he previously examined a very small queen garden bumblebee (Bombus hortorum) to confirm that it had indeed mated. I did wonder if this might be a problem, though equally, some males can also be very small. The large variation in size of spring queens may well reflect a reduced ability of workers to find food the previous summer, for example because of poor weather, or simply lack of the right flowers. Therefore some larvae may not get much food, and become small queens and males. Also, it is possible that the small size of these queens may mean that their dominance over the workers is reduced once the nest is established, and so success of these nests (in terms of new queens recruited) may be low.