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You just need to supply the native plants they prefer to pollinate, they’ll do the rest. If you’re wondering about whether you can harvest honey from them, I do
by chongli 7mo ago
You just need to supply the native plants they prefer to pollinate, they’ll do the rest. If you’re wondering about whether you can harvest honey from them, I don’t think so. Most native pollinator species don’t produce honey.
Bumblebees do produce a kind of honey, but it’s much thinner and less concentrated than proper honey (which has had most of the water evaporated off by the wing beats of the bees).
- bombcar 7mo agoA thousand years of effort might be able to "domesticate" the bumblebee and make it produce something akin to usable amounts of honey - but unlikely to be worth it.
- gus_massa 7mo agoSomeone domesticated foxes in 20 years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_silver_fox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_silver_fox , so perhaps it's possible to domesticate bumblebee in a few decades - but unlikely to be worth it.
- t-3 7mo agoBumblebees are being "domesticated" to some extent, for pollinating greenhouses, but they're used as labor animals rather than food.