Queen bees can breathe underwater, allowing them to stay alive over winter as melting snow floods their burrows.
Bumblebee queens can survive underwater for at least a week, according to new research.
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This remarkable feat occurs over winter, when the insects are buried underground and have entered a hibernation-like state known as diapause.
During this six to nine-month period, the queens are vulnerable to waterlogged conditions as rain and melting snow flood their shallow burrows.
Scientists have discovered that queen bees manage to stay alive until spring by breathing underwater, the only members of the colony to do so.
Queen bees can survive underwater
The finding comes from a new study published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.
The investigation was sparked by an earlier chance finding by researcher Sabrina Rondeau, a co-author of the new study.
During an experiment looking at how pesticides affect bumblebees, she placed diapausing queens in soil-filled tubes in a refrigerator.
One day, she found that water from condensation had filled some of the tubes, leaving four queens completely submerged. To her surprise, the bees were still alive.
Rondeau then confirmed her discovery in a 2024 study which showed that queen bumblebees can survive underwater for a week.
Why queen bees don’t drown in flooded ground
The new study wanted to dig into how the queen bees had this unusual ability.
To investigate, the team induced healthy queens into diapause by placing them in a cold, dark refrigerator that recreated winter conditions.
After several weeks, they then submerged the insects in chambers flooded with water.
Some bees were kept underwater for a few hours, while others stayed for up to eight days.
Throughout the experiment, the researchers measured their metabolic rate and recorded physiological changes.
They found that the submerged queens continued to produce carbon dioxide at a low, but detectable, rate, showing they were breathing underwater.
The metabolic rate remained steady whether the bees were submerged for a few hours or the full eight days.
Ability to endure flood-prone conditions ‘may be critically important’
As well as respiration, the bees relied on a supplementary anaerobic energy system, which led to lactate accumulation in their bodies, the researchers found.
Once removed from the flooded chambers, the queens’ metabolic rate spiked dramatically for two to three days as their bodies recovered and worked to clear the lactate.
“Such physiological capacity underpins [queen bees’] resilience to environmental extremes and provides insights into how terrestrial insects may persist in flood-prone habitats,” the team wrote in their paper.
“The ability to endure such conditions may be critically important, especially in the face of changing spring flooding patterns.”
