How Have the Arctic Bees Adapted to a Cold Climate? What happens when the Climate Changes?

How can a bumblebee survive in the cold Arctic Summer?

Bombus polaris and Bombus pyrrhopygus, known as the Arctic bumblebees, live in northern Scandinavia, Canada, Russia, and the US state of Alaska. These are cold places, and surviving in them requires a greater effort to regulate their temperature. This insect might be a small animal, but it has adapted to the cold climate by growing big for a bee species and being hairier. It also builds insulated nests.

This is a story about how one small insect solved a big engineering problem — staying warm — millions of years before humans ever thought to design insulation. It’s a clear example of biomimicry: looking at nature’s already-tested solutions when we’re solving our own problems.

What you’ll learn:

• How the Arctic bumblebee uses size, hair, and shivering to survive freezing temperatures
• Why this bee’s body is a real-world model for insulation and heat-generation design
• What’s already going wrong as Arctic warming pushes bees and flowers out of sync

Bombus polaris and Bombus pyrrhopygus, known as the Arctic bumblebee, live in northern Scandinavia, Canada, Russia…

Being a large animal is advantageous if you live in a colder climate, and the Arctic bee is a relatively large insect. It might take more energy to warm a large body, but a larger body will keep the heat for longer. The bee is also hairier than most other bumble bees. The hair helps to trap the heat the bee generates.

On sunny days, the Arctic bees are basking in the sunlight. This helps them warm their bodies and even use flowers to raise their body temperature more quickly. You can find the bees sitting inside flowers like Arctic poppies.

On cloudy and cold days, when the temperature may even drop to below zero, the Arctic bumblebee generates heat by shivering! The bee vibrates its large flight wings a little extra in cold weather, keeping it warm even when the sun is not shining.

Arctic bees’ ability to fly for long distances and at low temperatures makes them very important pollinators. They also play an important role in the biodiversity of wild plant species in the Arctic region. They help wildflowers, willows, and berries thrive, which is good for birds and larger animals like reindeer.

What will happen to this bee when the climate changes?

The bumble bees’ behaviour is changing as the temperature rises. In warmer weather, the bees are out earlier, and they are also changing how they interact with flowers. Changes in one species can influence another species, and fewer flowers and plants might influence larger animals such as reindeer. But we know little about the long-term consequences of the bumble bees’ behaviour.

Keith Larson studies plant communities in the Arctic environment. He has found that the tree line is creeping up mountains as the climate gets warmer. This means that the number of flowers growing in an area will change (Arctic vegetation does not grow where the trees grow). Bumble bees and plants have evolved together for thousands of years, but now the relationship is out of sync.

One thing that surprised the researcher, Keith Larson, was that the plants were creeping up the mountain as the climate changed, but species were also creeping down the mountain. This meant that there were fewer areas for plant species to survive. The plant species might be growing in patches further and further apart, making it more difficult for pollinators, like bees, to visit different plants. Many plants in the Arctic region are perennials, which means that they do not reproduce every year, and with fewer pollinators, this might be a disaster.

Try This With Young Explorers

The Insulation Test. Wrap one ice cube in a thin layer of cotton wool or fake fur, and leave a second ice cube uncovered. Set both in the same spot and check every 10 minutes. Which one melts slower? That’s the same trick the bee’s hair is doing for its body heat.

Shiver to Warm Up. Have kids rub their hands together quickly for 20 seconds, then feel the temperature difference. Ask: Where does that heat come from? This is a simple, safe way to feel exactly what the bee’s flight muscles are doing when it “shivers” in the cold.

Big or Small? Fill two containers of different sizes with warm water — the same starting temperature in both — and check them every 15 minutes with a thermometer (or just by touch, if no thermometer is handy). Which one stays warm longer? This mirrors why being a larger bee is actually an advantage in the Arctic — big bodies lose heat more slowly than small ones.

Why This Matters

The Arctic bumblebee never had access to electricity, batteries, or lab equipment — just fur, size, and the ability to shiver on purpose. And yet it solved a problem engineers still work hard to solve: how to generate and hold onto heat with almost no energy to spare. That’s biomimicry in its rawest form — not a shape to copy, but a strategy: trap air, grow a little bigger, move just enough to make your own warmth.

It’s also a reminder that these strategies aren’t guaranteed to keep working. The bee’s whole survival plan is built around a predictable Arctic rhythm — and that rhythm is exactly what’s now shifting beneath it.

So here’s a question worth handing to a curious child: if you had to design something that stays warm using only trapped air and constant tiny movement — no batteries, no plug — what would you build, and what could you learn from a bee to build it?

Bees are a wonderful study any time of year, but seeing the first bumblebee in Spring is extra special. Feel inspired by the curiosity and wonder over this stunning insect. Use art and story writing to further ignite their curiosity and creativity. Why not make a Help Save Poster with a bumblebee and poppies?

Want to learn more about bees? Check out this blog post.

What is great about Antifreeze Arctic Bumblebees?

AI was used as a Thinking Partner.