Imagine opening up your lab refrigerator to find out your bumblebees were mysteriously submerged in water. This is what one scientist in Canada found while studying the effects of pesticides, according to Smithsonian Magazine.
In the original study, ecologist Sabrina Rondeau wanted to know the effects of pesticides on the common eastern bumblebees and had stored several queen bees in dirt-filled tubes, Smithsonian Magazine reports.
In order to recreate winter conditions when bumblebee queens would be hibernating, she stored them in a fridge. It was during this original study that Rondeau found some of her queen bees had gotten submerged in water over time due to condensation.
Rondeau told New Scientist, “I kind of freaked out. I was sure the queens were dead.”
But to her surprise, when she took the supposedly dead queen bees out of the fridge, they woke up.
They planned to ‘drown’ more bees
In a new study published this week in the journal Biology Letters, Rondeau and her teammate, Nigel Raine, took 143 common eastern bumblebee queens and simulated winter conditions with soil-filled tubes where a bee could be submerged underwater. Their limit for the bees was seven days and they would vary the bees’ time spent underwater (either eight hours, 24 hours or seven days).
Raine told CNN, “These (bees) are terrestrial organisms, they’re not really designed to be underwater.”
According to Smithsonian Magazine, the team had a control group of 17 queen bees in a dry environment to compare each group’s survival rates. After being submerged, both groups of bees were then moved into a new soil environment and watched over for eight weeks, per the study.
What they found is that both groups had a similar survival rate. The group of submerged bees had an 81% survival rate, while the control group of bees had an 88% survival rate, per Smithsonian Magazine.
How does this help the bumblebee queens?
CNN reports that only the queen bees are alive during the winter season by going into hibernation underground while the rest of the hive dies. Raine explains to CNN that queen bees can often be found in “well-drained soil in banks.”
Raine explained that the common eastern bumblebee queen bee could survive underwater due to what is called diapause. This is when the queen bees undergo a “state of suspended growth and reproduction characterized by reduced oxygen intake” and can stop water from entering their bodies, per CNN.
These bumblebee queens are a rare case of animals that can survive being flooded, according to the study, and it shows how resilient they can be in the wild.