Webinar: Bumble Bees (Great Southeast Pollinator Course — Week Two)
Webinar Date: June 23, 2026
Speakers: Rich Hatfield (Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation); Becky Griffin (UGA Extension)
Series: Great Southeast Pollinator Course
Source: Corrected SRT (Stage 1) — GTBOP_Transcript_2026-06-23_Bumblebees.srt (280 blocks); Archive Package (Stage 2) for structural reference
Purpose: These twelve prompts direct students to specific video segments with a focused task. Taken in order, they also give a course developer a ready outline for subdividing the ~84-minute recording into Moodle sections. The set spans the full session and segments cleanly at the presenter handoff: prompts 1–7 cover Rich Hatfield’s ecology-and-conservation half (ends 43:41), and prompts 8–12 cover Becky Griffin’s identification-and-census half (43:41–1:24:44).
Part One — Rich Hatfield: Bumble Bee Ecology and Conservation
Review Task 1
Watch: 1:19 – 6:14
Task: Note Hatfield’s case for why bees, of all the insect pollinators, matter most.
Key Points to Identify:
- One in three bites of human food, and 90% of the world’s flowering plants, depend on pollinators.
- Bees intentionally collect and transport pollen because it is their only protein source — which is what makes them effective pollinators.
- Wildlife from songbirds to grizzly bears depends on pollinator-supported plants for food and shelter.
Review Task 2
Watch: 6:14 – 9:12
Task: Capture the scale of bee diversity and the traits that set bumble bees apart.
Key Points to Identify:
- Rough diversity figures: >20,000 bee species worldwide, ~5,200 in North America, ~500 in the Southeast; ~250 bumble bee species worldwide, ~50 in North America, ~16 in the Southeast.
- Bumble bees regulate their own body temperature and can fly in cold conditions.
- Their problem-solving has tested on par with some “higher” animals; their broad diet makes them important pollinators of many plants, including ones like bottle gentian whose corolla never opens.
Review Task 3
Watch: 9:12 – 15:46
Task: Trace the annual bumble bee life cycle and explain how cuckoo bumble bees break the pattern.
Key Points to Identify:
- The annual cycle: a queen leaves her hibernacula in spring, founds a nest, raises a first brood of workers, then later produces reproductives (next year’s queens and males); only the mated new queens overwinter.
- Egg to winged adult takes four to six weeks, leaving the lone queen exposed during the first brood.
- Cuckoo bumble bees invade another species’ nest, displace the foundress queen, and use her workers to raise their own all-reproductive offspring.
Review Task 4
Watch: 15:48 – 20:44
Task: Summarize buzz pollination and what is known (and not known) about bumble bee nesting and overwintering.
Key Points to Identify:
- Buzz pollination releases pollen from plants with poricidal anthers (pollen locked in a tube, “like a salt shaker”); ~8–10% of plants benefit, and honey bees do not do it.
- Nests are usually in abandoned rodent burrows underground — the nest ball can sit meters from the entrance.
- Queens overwinter an inch or two underground; overwintering sites, not just flowers, may be a limiting factor for some declining species.
Review Task 5
Watch: 20:44 – 30:14
Task: Lay out why bumble bees are declining — the listed species and the compounding threats.
Key Points to Identify:
- About a quarter of North American bumble bees face extinction risk, including six of the Southeast’s ~16 species; three are on the ESA — rusty patched (Bombus affinis, 2017), Franklin’s (2022), Suckley cuckoo (Bombus suckleyi, proposed 2025).
- Neonicotinoids are systemic and water-soluble, expressed in pollen and nectar as sublethal microdoses, and can persist in soil seven years after one application.
- Other compounding threats: habitat loss, the pathogen Vairimorpha bombi spread by commercial bumble bees, honey bee competition (15,000–80,000 bees per hive), and climate change.
Review Task 6
Watch: 30:14 – 37:37
Task: List the concrete home actions Hatfield recommends and how community science fits in.
Key Points to Identify:
- Build habitat: diverse native plantings with early-spring and late-fall blooms (e.g., goldenrod, milkweed); choose real flowers over pollen-less horticultural varieties; avoid pre-treated nursery plants.
- Provide shelter by leaving messy areas — brush piles, leaf litter, pine duff on shady, north-facing slopes — and act at any scale, “don’t let perfect be the barrier of good.”
- Join community science: the Bumble Bee Atlas (bumblebeeatlas.org); the Southeast effort has gathered 6,200 observations on 12 species over three years.
Review Task 7
Watch: 37:37 – 43:41
Task: Review the Hatfield Q&A and note the answers a field observer would find most useful.
Key Points to Identify:
- Telling a queen from a worker in the field is unreliable — there is a narrow size gap, hardest to judge in midsummer.
- A queen incubates eggs by detaching her wings from her flight muscles and shivering to make heat — calorie-intensive; nest size ranges from ~50 to over a thousand (the common eastern bumble bee runs to ~1,000).
- Infrared has not located nests; radio telemetry (tiny glued-on antennae) and new ultralight solar tags are the promising tools.
Part Two — Becky Griffin: Identifying Bumble Bees and Counting for the Census
Review Task 8
Watch: 43:41 – 48:35
Task: Set up bumble bees as pollinators and learn the basic insect anatomy Griffin introduces.
Key Points to Identify:
- Griffin works at the UGA Mountain Research and Education Center in Blairsville; each of ~1,800 apple trees needs blossoms visited about eight times, mostly by native bees.
- The three insect body sections — head (sensory organs, antennae), thorax (wings and legs attach), abdomen (segments called tergites; stinger if female).
- The pollen press is introduced here as a part to examine more closely.
Review Task 9
Watch: 48:35 – 57:31
Task: Connect the corbicula and bumble bee foraging behavior to true habitat and to the eastern bumble bee.
Key Points to Identify:
- The corbicula (pollen basket) is on females only; honey bees and bumble bees have it, while bees like the sweat bee carry pollen on leg bristles instead.
- True habitat is more than flowers — bagging leaves and clearing fallen twigs can remove overwintering queens and nest sites.
- The eastern bumble bee (Bombus impatiens) is the most common in Georgia (~70%), with a long tongue and a yellow first tergite; bumble bees learn a flower’s morphology and revisit the same type, which aids fertilization. Most are generalists.
Review Task 10
Watch: 57:31 – 1:09:38
Task: Work through the bumble bee body systems Griffin says make it a “perfect pollination machine.”
Key Points to Identify:
- Pile (bee hair) is branched and becomes positively charged in flight, so negatively charged pollen jumps on and stays trapped (the “whoop effect”); a metallic sweat bee has sparse hair and moves far less pollen.
- Bees have four wings that move forward/backward (not just up/down); delicate wings wear out and are a cause of death.
- Tarsi/tarsal claws work like grappling hooks; ocelli (three small eyes) aid orientation; bees see blues and greens but not red, follow floral “landing strips,” and have solved untaught problems in recent cognition studies.
Review Task 11
Watch: 1:09:38 – 1:15:25
Task: Pin down exactly what a census counter needs to know and why bumble bees are the superior pollinator.
Key Points to Identify:
- For the census you only need to recognize a bumble bee — no species ID required.
- The field tell: a bumble bee is fat and fuzzy with a hairy abdomen (“fuzzy fanny”); a carpenter bee has a smooth, bald abdomen (“shiny hiney”), which reduces friction as it tunnels through wood (Week One callback).
- Recap of why bumble bees excel: need pollen and nectar, abundant pile, large and strong, can shiver, buzz pollinate crops like tomatoes and peppers, long tongues, generalist but flower-faithful, open flowers with their weight, and tarsal claws.
Review Task 12
Watch: 1:15:25 – 1:24:44
Task: Review the closing Q&A and the practical management points raised.
Key Points to Identify:
- Diatomaceous earth is not considered harmful to bumble bees; to buffer neighboring pesticide use, use a physical barrier (e.g., a tall hedgerow or non-flowering screen) and place intentional habitat as far from the source as possible.
- Mosquito adulticides can harm bumble bees and drift far — the better approach is preventative larval control and eliminating standing water.
- A resource-rich half-mile diameter could support a colony, since bumble bees forage the shortest distance they can; small suburban habitat genuinely helps. (Next week: butterflies, with Dr. Sonia Altizer and Jeremy Rhoden.)
Processed for UGA Center for Urban Agriculture / Great Southeast Pollinator Course Archives
Source: Corrected SRT (Stage 1) — GTBOP_Transcript_2026-06-23_Bumblebees.srt (280 blocks); Archive Package (Stage 2)