You’d think it would be easy to find a chart comparing the sizes of queens, drones, and workers, wouldn’t ya?
I saw (and photographed) a very large bee in the yard. Looked pretty much like a normal bumblebee, except for being nearly as long as my thumb. I figured she was probably a queen, but I decided to check online exactly how big the non-workers are. For all I knew it was a drone, or some different species altogether.
You’d think it would be easy. You’d think wrong. There are pictures of queens by themselves. There are pictures of queens and drones. (She’s a heckuva lot bigger then he is). There are lots of “sexy bumblebee” costumes cluttering up the search. But I can’t find a simple side-by-side comparison of a queen and worker.
If you manage to find one in three seconds of Googling, I’ll feel appropriately embarrassed. But I haven’t.
Would a queen be on a flower gathering nectar? I though the queen only left the hive to go start another hive, and never left it again. But I’m ignorant about such things.
We used to get bumble bees under our house, some years there’d be a thriving colony other years nothing at all.
It doesn’t look like a bumble bee, but then again there’s other species of bumble bees and I’m not an expert beyond reading insects of the British isles.
A guess: perhaps it’s a drone of another species.
I don’t think there’s a massive amount of dimorphism between a bumble bee queen and workers as bumble bees are more primitive socially than other bees.
The black spot on its back and the long black butt indicate that you’ve got a drone carpenter bee. See here for a picture that shows size. For a more entertaining picture, here is a comparison between the smallest bee in the world, Perdita minima, and the largest, the female carpenter bee.
Oh, yes, now I see tiny faded male and female symbols next to them. I actually saw that pic, but I didn’t know what it was supposed to be.
spenczar- I saw something about bumble versus carpenter bees and I was wondering about that. We have plenty of normal-sized bees that look just like that (but skinnier, I guess). Then again, Professor Google tells me there are about eight zillion types of bumble bee, and some of the pics I saw looked like ours.
While it is true that Bumblebee colonies die back to the queen each year and it is possible that the queen would be out gathering nectar, it is very doubtful she would be out this time of year. That picture is most likely just a normal, unfertilized (but not sterile) worker bee. The queen typically on forages in the spring, this time of year she should be focusing on laying eggs.
