Data from: Wild foundress queen bumble bees make numerous, short foraging trips and exhibit frequent nest failure: Insights from trap-nesting and RFID tracking

The overwhelming majority of research on wild bumble bees has focused on
the social colony stage. Nest-founding queens in the early season are
difficult to study because incipient nests are challenging to find in the
wild, and the foundress queen's flight period is very short relative
to the entire nesting period. As a result, natural history information on
foundress queens is exceedingly rare. New methodological approaches are
needed to adequately study this elusive life stage. We trap-nested wild
queen bumble bees in artificial nest boxes in Gothic, Colorado, and used a
custom-built radio frequency identification (RFID) system to continuously
record queen foraging activity (inferred from entering and exiting the
nest) for the majority of their spring flight periods. Foundress queens
made frequent, short foraging trips, which tended to increase in duration
over the course of the flight period. All queens who produced adult
workers ceased foraging within approximately one week after workers
emerged in the nest. We observed frequent nest failure among foundress
queens: fewer than one quarter of queens who laid eggs in nest boxes went
on to produce reproductive gynes at the end of the season. We also report
nest characteristics and curious phenomena we observed, including
conspecific nest invasion and queens remaining outside the nest overnight.
We present this trap-nesting and subsequent RFID tracking method as a
valuable, albeit resource-intensive, path forward for uncovering new
information about the elusive, incipient life stage of wild bumble bees.