You may not know: Queen bumblebees can live underwater for a whole week

The study's lead author, Ms. Sabrina Rondeau, said she accidentally discovered the remarkable underwater survival ability of bumblebees while performing experiments in her doctoral thesis.

Initially, the purpose of the study was to examine the effects of pesticide residues in soil on queen bumble bees . During the experiment, Rondeau accidentally put water into a tube containing some bees, however, these bees survived after being "submerged" in the water.

An Eastern bumblebee is sucking nectar from an apple flower - (Photo: Nigel Raine/CNN).

Further experiments were conducted to understand this phenomenon. Specifically, the researchers placed 143 hibernating queen bees in tubes with different conditions, including tubes containing no water, tubes containing just enough water to cover, and tubes completely submerged for 8 hours. hours to 7 days.

The results showed that 81% of queen bees completely submerged in water still survived after 7 days , then continued to maintain life for another 8 weeks under normal dry conditions.

Ms Rondeau called the survival of these important pollinators "encouraging", especially in light of the alarming decline in bee populations globally.

Co-author Nigel Raine from the University of Guelph (Canada) said the research has helped shed light on the challenges faced by insects, especially bees that nest or overwinter underground. These challenges include global warming leading to more frequent and extreme flooding in many regions of the world.

While the ability to survive underwater is promising, Ms. Rondeau emphasized the need for further, broader research to determine how common this trait is to other bee species, given the has focused only on the common Oriental bumblebee found in North America, which is known to be more robust than other bee species whose populations are in decline.

The research was published in the journal Biology on April 17.