Mistake in lab leads to surprising discovery: bumblebees can survive under water | Animals

Actually, it was not the scientists’ original idea to investigate whether bumblebees could survive underwater. But when one experiment accidentally spilled water into a test tube containing a queen bumblebee, one of the researchers noticed that the animal continued to live. This made scientists at Canada’s University of Guelph so curious that they set up a completely new experiment.

This showed that bumblebee queens can survive underwater for up to seven days. This is striking, because most insects die when they end up under water.

The scientists found this out by placing 143 living hibernating bumblebee queens in a plastic tube with a layer of moist soil. Normally, a queen bumblebee burrows into the ground before hibernating. Some of the bumblebees were kept completely submerged in water for a week. After this, more than 80 percent of the bumblebee queens still lived, the researchers write in the scientific journal Biology Letters.

“It is the first time that there is hard evidence that bumblebees can survive underwater. I know of no other study that shows this,” says David Kleijn, professor of Plant Ecology and Nature Management at Wageningen University & Research. “At the same time, the research does not surprise me. Bumblebees of this species occur in very wet and cold areas. Then it makes sense that they should be able to stay alive temporarily underwater.”

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It is not yet clear how exactly the bumblebee queens manage to do this. In a follow-up study, the scientists want to find out which mechanisms underlie this. One of the factors that is expected to play a role is that hibernating bumblebee queens require little oxygen.

Bumblebees are threatened with extinction. So this discovery is good news. Climate change will cause more rain to fall, causing the soil in which the bumblebee queens hibernate to become increasingly wetter. In extremely heavy rain they can even end up completely under water. The fact that this species of bumblebee queens can temporarily remain alive may mean that climate change poses less of a threat to them than previously thought.

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