PHOTO: White-tailed bumblebee Wendy Carter
Keep it in the family Before we look at the various types of bumblebees, it’s useful to understand their life cycle. The large queen bee hibernates during winter, after digging into well-drained soil and excavating a small chamber for herself. Thanks to that warm furry coat she can survive temperatures as low as -19C. As spring arrives, the queen wakes up, digs her way out of the chamber and heads off to feed, which is why it’s important to have nectar-rich flowers blooming in your garden early in the year. She will hunt for suitable nesting places - where this might be depends on the species - but it could be underground, at the base of a tussock or in a bird box. Once she’s identified a suitable location, the queen builds up stores of pollen and nectar in wax cells in preparation for her new family, then retreats into the nest for good. From this point on her life's work is to lay eggs and attend to her family;
she will never see the light of day again. This means the bumblebees you see from late spring to late summer are usually the smaller female workers collecting pollen to feed the growing colony. The first eggs to emerge are all female workers and it’s only later, when the colony is sizeable, that the larger males and new queens are born. The two sexes then mate and the cycle begins again. As always in nature, there is an exception in the form of cuckoo bumblebees…females who will steal a colony from another queen, lay their own eggs and enslave the original females to raise the cuckoo eggs. The ‘Big 7’ Not all 25 species of bumblebee are found in Worcestershire. Great yellow bumblebees, for example, are now confined to a few places in the north of Scotland despite once being widespread across the whole of the UK. In and around your
garden, you’re most likely to come across what the Bumblebee Conservation Trust call the ‘Big 7’: buff-tailed, white-tailed, redtailed, early, garden, tree and common carder bumblebees. So, how can you tell one from another? It can be confusing, especially when they’re nestled tightly in a flower, but the key things to look for are the face, the tail and the markings on the thorax, which is the middle section between the head and the abdomen, where the two pairs of wings and six legs are found. Spring is the ideal time to observe them before their colours fade and they become more ragged. Fortunately, similar-looking species of bees are rarely seen in south Worcestershire gardens so once identified you’re unlikely to mistake one for another. Buff-tailed & white-tailed Both buff-tailed and white-tailed bumblebees (pictured above) have a single yellow band on the thorax - it’s more orangey in buff 11