@onenicebugperday
Didn't manage to add this in a ask and had to cut a few minutes of it here also, but here's one of the bbees I reared this summer being born! They are born without the yellow pigment, which slowly spreads to the stripes within the first day of life. You can tell that the big sister that came to help by gnawing the opening in the comb a bit bigger is not that much older, maybe up to half a day max. They are virtually helpless and very docile and usually hide under the comb until their wings get their proper rigor and their legs gain rudimentary coordination. At this age they won't even sting. I can't recall the exact species here, and the options are almost impossible to ID reliably without DNA-analysis in the absence of drones, but I'm pretty sure this is a Bombus cryptarum nest. (Edit: the fool I am, not noticing the queen's yellow band on the abdomen has a black break, meaning this is likely a sporadicum nest) The workers in this nest are around the average size, but we also had nests where the workers were the same size as the queen and some that (sadly) only produced workers that were under half a centimeter long.
