Comment by chongli
12 hours ago
You just need to supply the native plants they prefer to pollinate, they’ll do the rest. If you’re wondering about whether you can harvest honey from them, I don’t think so. Most native pollinator species don’t produce honey.
Bumblebees do produce a kind of honey, but it’s much thinner and less concentrated than proper honey (which has had most of the water evaporated off by the wing beats of the bees).
A thousand years of effort might be able to "domesticate" the bumblebee and make it produce something akin to usable amounts of honey - but unlikely to be worth it.
Someone domesticated foxes in 20 years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_silver_fox , so perhaps it's possible to domesticate bumblebee in a few decades - but unlikely to be worth it.
Bumblebees are being "domesticated" to some extent, for pollinating greenhouses, but they're used as labor animals rather than food.