Incorrect Information about bumblebees

[Gregory Turner]

Re: articl
Wild queen bees attempt to invade commercial hives, but get slaughtered by rival workers
By Harry Baker
published 14 February 2023
Wild queen bumblebees get killed by worker bees inside commercial hives after they are lured in by vibrant colors and the promise of usurping the resident queen.
---------------------------------------------------
I was disturbed by your article about 'invading queen bumblebees.' I thought it was probably misleading.

I went to the actual original source (livescience.comlinks to it, see below) and as I suspected, the livescience article is truly flawed. The bumblebee gynes (not yet queens as they do not have a nest yet) are not invading - a total fabrication by the livescience author - they are search for a nest site and have the misfortune to encounter a already developed nest (totally artificial) and are dispatched. NOT INVADING. I hope you can make a correction as this is tragically inaccurate and gives a completely incorrect idea of what is happening here. The commercial nest is the invader if anyone is.

(If I could find an email for livescience.com, I would write them but not available.)

https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1365-2664.14353

quote

1. In response to anthropogenic environmental change, the cues that animals use throughout their lifecycle to optimize fitness may become unreliable, resulting in an ecological trap.
2. Here we investigated whether commercial bumble bee Bombus impatiens colonies managed for early spring crop pollination act as ecological traps for wild nest-searching Bombus queens by subverting their natural nest usurpation behaviour.