Bumblebee
Foraging behaviour

Bumblebees generally visit flowers that exhibit the bee pollination syndrome and these patches of flowers may be up to 1–2 km from their colony. They tend to visit the same patches of flowers every day, as long as they continue to find nectar and pollen there, a habit known as pollinator or flower constancy. While foraging, bumblebees can reach ground speeds of up to 15 m/s (54 km/h).

Bumblebees use a combination of colour and spatial relationships to learn which flowers to forage from. They can also detect both the presence and the pattern of electric fields on flowers, which occur due to atmospheric electricity, and take a while to leak away into the ground. They use this information to find out if a flower has been recently visited by another bee. Bumblebees can detect the temperature of flowers, as well as which parts of the flower are hotter or cooler and use this information to recognise flowers. After arriving at a flower, they extract nectar using their long tongues (" glossae ") and store it in their crops. Many species of bumblebees also exhibit "nectar robbing": instead of inserting the mouthparts into the flower in the normal way, these bees bite directly through the base of the corolla to extract nectar, avoiding pollen transfer.

Pollen is removed from flowers deliberately or incidentally by bumblebees. Incidental removal occurs when bumblebees come in contact with the anthers of a flower while collecting nectar. When it enters a flower, the bumblebee's body hairs receive a dusting of pollen from the anthers. In queens and workers this is then groomed into the corbiculae (pollen baskets) on the hind legs where it can be seen as bulging masses that may contain as many as a million pollen grains. Male bumblebees do not have corbiculae and do not purposively collect pollen. Bumblebees are also capable of buzz pollination, in which they dislodge pollen from the anthers by creating a resonant vibration with their flight muscles.

In at least some species, once a bumblebee has visited a flower, it leaves a scent mark on it. This scent mark deters bumblebees from visiting that flower until the scent degrades. This scent mark is a general chemical bouquet that bumblebees leave behind in different locations (e.g. nest, neutral, and food sites), and they learn to use this bouquet to identify both rewarding and unrewarding flowers, and may be able to identify who else has visited a flower. Bumblebees rely on this chemical bouquet more when the flower has a high handling time, that is, where it takes a longer time for the bee to find the nectar once inside the flower.

Once they have collected nectar and pollen, female workers return to the nest and deposit the harvest into brood cells, or into wax cells for storage. Unlike honeybees, bumblebees only store a few days' worth of food, so are much more vulnerable to food shortages. Male bumblebees collect only nectar and do so to feed themselves. They may visit quite different flowers from the workers because of their different nutritional needs.
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