Workers of two bumblebee species, Bombus terrestris L. and B. pascuorum Scopoli, had to find the way of escape out of a test tube closed with a paper membrane stretched against its open end. Nearly all of the tested individuals solved successfully that task by tearing a hole in the membrane closing the tube. However, their escape behaviour showed significant interspecific differences. B. terres...

Social insects are emerging models for epigenetics. Here we examine the link between monoallelic methylation and monoallelic expression in the bumblebee Bombus terrestris using whole methylome and transcriptome analysis. We found nineteen genes displaying monoallelic methylation and expression. They were enriched for functions to do with social organisation in the social insects. These are the ...

A serine protease was isolated from midguts of the bumblebee male Bombus terrestris by a combination of precipitation procedures with column chromatography. The purified enzyme exhibited two bands with molecular masses of 25 and 26 kDa as determined by sodium dodecyl sulfate polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis. These bands showed a proteolytic activity in zymography assay. Midgut enzymes showed ...

Bumblebees have been the focus of a broad range of scientific research due to their behavior, social life, and a number of other intriguing traits. Current methods for examining their nest structure, such as natal cells and contents of storage cells, are destructive in nature because the cells need to be opened for physical inspections. This research describes how the internal structures of the...

Habitat fragmentation can have severe effects on plant pollinator interactions, for example changing the foraging behaviour of pollinators. To date, the impact of plant population size on pollen collection by pollinators has not yet been investigated. From 2008 to 2010, we monitored nine bumble bee species (Bombus campestris, Bombus hortorum s.l., Bombus hypnorum, Bombus lapidarius, Bombus pasc...

Methylation has previously been associated with allele specific expression in ants. Recently, we found methylation is important in worker reproduction in the bumblebee Bombus terrestris. Here we searched for allele specific expression in twelve genes associated with worker reproduction in bees. We found allele specific expression in Ecdysone 20 monooxygenase and IMP-L2-like. Although we were un...