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Bumble Bees
Apart from the egocentric queen and the drones (male bees whose only function is to fertilise the queen,),
the vast majority of the inhabitants of the beehive are workers, sterile females, which toil for 16-18 hours
a day collecting nectar and building honeycombs of wax.
However, not all of the thirty or so species of bumble bees in Norway are of the industrious type.
There is the thief with a proboscis too short to reach down to the nectar in the flower’s corolla tube,
so it just bites a hole in it and the parasitic bumblebee with no pollen baskets, which lays its eggs
in other bumblebees’ nests, leaving them with the responsibility of feeding the larvae.
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