Susan Horner, age 11, of Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada, for her question:

Do bumblebees live in hives?

The big, fat bumblebees add to the sounds and scenery of summer. With other wild bees, they help pollinate vast numbers of large and small blossoms. Without them, next year's wild flowers would be very scanty indeed, and many crops would fail to develop seeds and fruit. Besides these vital ecological duties, each type of wild bee has its own fascinating life story.

Bumblebees are social insects, which means they like company. They live in colonies in which the various duties of child care and housekeeping are shared by different members of the family. The colony is smaller and less elaborate than a honeybee hive    and it lasts only through one summer season. It begins early in Spring when a young queen bumblebee emerges from her winter hibernation. For a few days she buzzes around feeding from the early flowers, and seems in no hurry to begin her serious duties.

At last she starts scurrying around to find a suitable place for her nest. She may select a deserted mouse burrow or perhaps a tuft of grassy roots in a meadow. Then she buzzes back and forth, bringing home her basic supplies. She builds a bed of woolly fibers and packs inside it a ball of pollen. She builds a few wax cells, then fills some with honey and others with her first eggs. In a few days, the eggs hatch into larvae. The queen mother has a very busy week or so, feeding them with a honey mixture of pollen and nectar.

Then the bumblebee larvae spin themselves silken cocoons and sleep about three weeks in the pupa stage. When they emerge, they are young adult worker bees. Usually there are only six or eight of them in the first brood. After a few days in the nest, they are ready to take over the housekeeping duties of the new colony. The queen mother then retires and devotes all of her time to laying bigger and better batches of eggs: Her growing family of working daughters shop for nectar, pollen and wax, prepare the honey, tend the babies, and build the cells which serve as cradles and storage cabinets.

Bumblebees have very long tongues. They can reach the nectar even in deep throated  blossoms such as honeysuckle and vetch, alfalfa and red clover. The prosperity of the colony depends on the seasonal flowers. Through the summer, the larvae get more food. The broods are larger and so are the bees. By midsummer there may be several hundred in the colony. Then some of the cocoons hatch into young queens and young male drones. In the Fall they leave the underground nest and go out into the meadow to participate in their hectic mating season. After this dramatic event, the male bumblebees all perish one by one, as well as the other members of the nest including the old queen mother. The young queens go off in search of suitable cracks and crevices to hibernate through the coming winter so that they will be ready to found their own colonies the next Spring.

A well fed bumblebee born in midsummer is one inch long    twice as long as a honeybee and much fatter. Wearing her fuzzy coat, handsomely striped with black and bright yellow, she wings from flower to flower. Take care not to annoy her because she has a poignant sting. And, unlike the honeybee, she can sting again and again without losing her life.