What is a cuckoo bumblebee?
A cuckoo bumblebee, like the bird it is named after, lays its eggs in another bumblebee s nest and leaves the workers of that nest to rear the young. Of course the eggs she lays are either queens or males, and the cuckoo queens emerge from hibernation in late spring or early summer, much later than ordinary bumblebee queens. So by the time the cuckoo queens have emerged the bumblebee queens will have already established their nests. The cuckoo differs physically from ordinary queen bumblebee in that she has no pollen basket on her rear legs, does not exude wax from between her abdominal segments, is slightly less hairy than ordinary bumblebees, and all species have shortish tongues. Cuckoos have a much harder body than normal bumblebees, and because no wax is exuded there are no weak points between the abdominal segments, so if there is a fight between a cuckoo and another worker or queen it is almost impossible for the queen or worker to force her sting into the cuckoo body. Apart fro
