SCIENCE LAB SPECIAL : BUMBLEBEE QUEEN

' Pesticides Preferred ' : For a good winter's rest, a bumble queen chooses to hibernate in a toxic environment.

North-facing, sloping ground with loose, sandy soil - if you're a bumblebee queen in the market for a winter home, these features will have you racing to close the deal.

But scientists were recently stunned to find there's something else these monarchs like to have in a place as they hibernate : pesticides.

In a paper published in the journal Science of The Total Environment, researchers described an experiment that gave common eastern bumblebee queens a choice : hibernate in clean soil or in soil laced with pesticides. The insects' behavior was the opposite of what had been expected.

'' Queens did not avoid any of the pesticides,'' said Sabrina Rondeau, an ecologist at the University of Ottawa. '' Even at high concentrations they didn't, and still seem to prefer the soil contaminated with pesticides.''

S. Hollis Woodard, a bee biologist at the University of California, Riverside, said, '' It wasn't just one pesticide at one concentration, it was across the board.''

That's scary, she said, because the U.S. soils are full of pesticides. Gravitating toward them may put queens at risk of direct exposure, with potentially damaging consequences.

Most of the roughly 250 species of bumblebee have annual life cycles in which queens start new colonies in the spring that grow through the summer before dying out in the fall.

As winter nears, queens that have mated burrow into the soil to sleep through the cold before restarting the cycle. [ Darren Incorvaia ]