Bumblebees living in the city have healthier colonies than their rural counterparts, according to researchers at Royal Holloway, University of London. Compared to agricultural colonies, urban bees hosted fewer parasites, produced more offspring, built up bigger food stores, and lived longer. The findings were published today (June 27) in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
“There are a few species that are really able to exploit the urban environment—pigeons, rats, foxes,” study coauthor Ash Samuelson tells New Scientist. “It seems like bees belong to that group.”
To make the comparison, Samuelson and her colleagues went out into Windsor Great Park, a more than 4,000-hectare park in Surrey in the U.K., and captured nearly 200 wild bumblebee (Bombus terrestris) queens. From these, the researchers successfully raised more than 40 colonies, each with a single queen.
Next, they placed one colony at each of 38 sites spread across a variety of urban ...
