What is this? (Half bee)

Found one the other day myself, crawling on the hive stand. Consensus on here is that they're getting their butt pinched off
when doing an inspection. I did not damage this bee, hadnt even opened a hive yet. This one i captured lived overnight in a jar.

I had one of those when we were doing a cutout. I figured some how she got pinched. She was acting like everything was normal. It really creeped me out.....

That's Eric!

Saw my first one just today, was sort of freaky, I poked at it thinking it was dead and it just crawled away as if it didn't know it's rear half was missing.

Exactly!

No signs of trauma and they act completely unaware!

Those are sting less bees. Lol

I've seen this before but it usually starts in the summer and goes all the way through fall... It took me a while to figure out what it was but here in Northern California it turned out to be Yellow Jackets and Bald Face Hornets and I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes. The Yellow jackets and hornets buzz around the landing board looking for the right moment and then they grab a bee sever the abdomen with their mouths, fly off with it and leave the head and thorax to walk around for a while until they die. We still have a couple months before that starts happening here but we just had some snow last week, are there many yellow jackets or hornets out in your area?

Didn't notice any at the site.

How long do they live,

We didn't see much "outside" activity... No robbing, nothing really... Even though we had lots of exposed honey by the end of the day. Just one bumble bee was making her rounds and checking things out.

Could it be from all the pesticides we pour into our food sources and theirs has made them mutant like?

It got cut in half somewhere in the process of your manipulations. They can live this way until they starve... which they will with no abdomen...

firefly22 said:

Could it be from all the pesticides we pour into our food sources and theirs has made them mutant like?

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Definitely this. Unexplained problem? Don't look any further, blame the chemical boogeyman for all your problems.

Gilligan said:

View attachment 9893

This was in a tree cut out we did. We found quite a few of these guys wondering around on us.

They didn't look like they were severed, it looked like they hatched this way or something.

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This is a video of a bee that I cut in 2 by mistake. I think it happened when you did your cutout.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KoUZaP4K6A