Floral Visitors, bumble bee problem
Garak (Sun, 02 Aug 2015 13:30:18 PDT)

Hi Åke ,

I'm not sure if it's one or more species - I'm not good at telling
bumblebees apart, basically anything winged that looks slightly
overweight is a bumblebee to me. A quick Wikipedia check makes Bombus
Hortorum a likely candidate. Definitely some sort with a white tip of
the lower body. As I said: this Summer was extraordinary dry and hot in
southern germany - July saw +4K on average Temperature and about 40% of
average rain after a series of very dry months. I think it had a
disastrous effect on meadows, so that even clover and dandelion ceased
flowering.
Mirabilis Jalapa will see another month or two of flowering (one for
hibernated tubers, two for seedlings), so I hope you're right and the
queens won't learn that trick. In worst case scenario I'll have to pause
a year and hope no on else has them - Mirabilis isn't that popular
around here ('cause most people have no taste in flowers ;) ).

Greetings,
Martin

Am 02.08.2015 um 20:13 schrieb Åke Nordström:

Hi Martin!

I don't know for how long your Mirabilis will keep on flowering, but at the end of the season when the last bumble bee larvae are produced - the ones that are going to be new queens and produce the new colonies next season, I would guess the flowering is over. If so, the new queens will stick to other food sources and will not be able to learn this habit and they can't pass it on to next season and bumble bee generation. Of course, if it happened once it can happen again, but I guess something must have happened to their main food plants this year so this was just a coincidence. Do you know what species of bumble bee it was? Or was it more than one species?

Greetings from Åke in northern Sweden, where the summer is still cold (12-15 C) and wet.