How to feed a bumble bee colony
Posted onFebruary 18, 2025byCole Blair|Bumble Bee Recovery, Bumble Bees, Events, Native Pollinator Initiative, News and Events, Pollinators, Yellow Banded BumblebeePhoto: T. Harrison
What is the Bumble Bee Recovery Program? Since the 1990s, bumble bee numbers have been plummeting, and that spells ecological disaster. Ninety per cent of all flowering plants — including most of the fruits and vegetables in your fridge — need these pollinators in order to reproduce.
Until the causes of these declines can be reversed, conservation breeding and reintroduction is the only way to safeguard at-risk bumble bees. Today, WPC is the only organization in Canada rebuilding wild bee populations through conservation breeding. Thanks to recent breakthroughs, we’ve figured out how to dramatically increase the number of queens we produce. Once they’re released into the wild, they can establish their own colonies, producing hundreds of pollinators to sustain the ecosystems around them.
If you’ve been following along with the efforts of our Bumble Bee Conservation Lab, you’ll know that our dedicated staff care for and monitor these fuzzy friends throughout their entire life cycle. But wait… don’t bumble bees need flowers to feed from? How do our lab’s colonies stay fed?
In the wild, bumble bees forage nectar and pollen from a variety of flowers to fulfill their dietary needs. In our Conservation Lab, this looks quite different! Pollen and nectar are provided to each of the colonies by our staff, and today we’d like to delve into how we prepare pollen to feed our buzzing bees!
We start with dried pollen grains. Then, using a food processor or a spice grinder, we grind up the pollen grains until it becomes a fine, loose powder (Pictured above, photo by S. Evans).
We then mix in small amounts of nectar that we whip up in-house to turn the pollen into a dough. You can see the dough coming together in the above photo (Photo by P. Smale). Our bumble bakery is now ready to start preparing delicious and nutritious meals for our queens and their colonies!
We store this ready-to-roll dough in a sealed bag to keep it fresh (see below photo, photo by P. Smale).
The doughy pollen is then broken apart into tiny pieces and rolled into balls, each weighing the same amount to help us meet the colonies’ needs and monitor their feeding habits (Pictured above, photo by P. Smale).
When a queen is first installed in the lab, we will actually feed them pollen balls coated in beeswax. You can see two of these special pollen balls in the above image (Photo by A. Saleh). The beeswax coating helps the pollen inside remain fresh, which means that the queens can remain undisturbed for a longer period before new pollen balls are needed. This is crucially beneficial for the queens as they need peace and quiet in order to feel comfortable enough to initiate their colonies.
Cole Blair
Ontario Program Coordinator – Bumble Bee Recovery Program
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