Introduction. The contemporary state of bumble beekeeping

Evolution of utilization of any biological resourse passes usually the following stages:

1. Hunting and/or collecting.
2. Taking biological resourse (organism or group of organisms) from natural environment to the close surrounding of home.

3 Growing and keeping organism or group of organisms in the optimal or super-optimal artificial environment created specially for this purpose.

All the above listed stages are obvious for the conventional honey beekeeping. But the same has passed the keeping of bumblebees. Now honey beekeeping and bumble beekeeping have achieved the level of industry. But this has caused also the well-known problems of the contemporary agricultural sphere: monoculture, decline of bio-diversity, the possible negative consequences of introducing the species of bumblebees, which were absent in the given ecosystem previously, etc.

The obstacles of wide spreading of bumblebees’ utilization in the contemporary agriculture have mostly cultural, bureaucratical and finan cial reasons.

Scientific knowledge about bumblebees is also developed not uniformly. Faunistical and taxonomical studies are well represented as well, as contemplative descriptions in nature and well-expressed laboratory studies of physiology, biochemistry, genetics, and socio-biology. But the real situation in nature (foraging under natural conditions, nest boxes occupation rates and the dynimics of it, ecological capacity of given territories, etc.) is poorly studied. It is no surprise, because the studies ol this kind require years of repeated observations and experiments within the given territory.

A short review of scientific literature is given within the following themes.

1. Extraction of wild nests of bumblebees from the natural sites and transfering them to the fields of crops. Attracting bumblebees in the artificial domiciles (nest-boxes, trap-nests) for the purposes of crop pollination.
2. All the monographs, where methods and techniques are explained, are listed.

3- Rearing and keepeeng of bumblebees in captivity, including mating and hibernation of queens and inducing them to establish a new nest after hibernation.

4. Russian investigations in the field of engineering approach to bumblebees, which are not known in the world, are listed also.

5- Marking methods and the equipment to work with the marked animals are listed, including the recent sophisticated devices and counters.

6. Tracking flying bumblebees with the harmonic radar methods.