Welcome to The Bumblebee Pages. The menu above will take you to the major sections of the web site. If you are not sure which page you should be looking at try Google's search engine at the top right of this, and every page.

Bumblebees are large, hairy insects with a lazy buzz and clumsy, bumbling flight. Many of them are black and yellow, and along with ladybirds and butterflies are perhaps the only insects that almost everyone likes.

Bees and Einstein
It has been widely reported that Einstein said that without bees to pollinate our food crops humans would die off in just 4 years. He was wrong, we will die off in 7 years. We have been warned, but will it do any good? We are the most intelligent animal that has ever lived, but we have not yet acquired the ability to learn from our mistakes, and we continue to elect politicians who promise us jam today and jam tomorrow. Isn't it time we grew up?

The photograph below shows the extended sting of a Bombus lapidarius queen. You don't often see stings as bumblebees are reluctant to use them. For more on this go to the sting page.

Bombus crotchii

Range: California and Mexico

Above are two North American bumblebees, the North American page shows many more species and their ranges.

Bumblebees are found mainly in northern temperate regions, though there are a few native South American species and New Zealand has some naturalised species that were introduced around 100 years ago to pollinate red clover. They range much further north than honey bees, and colonies can be found on Ellesmere Island in northern Canada, only 880 km from the north pole!

With the recent popularity of using bumblebees in glasshouse pollination they will probably be found in most parts of the world before long (see below), especially Bombus terrestris which seems to be the most popular species sold for this purpose.

On the left is a diagram showing the yearly life cycle of a bumblebee colony, for more information, drawings and photographs visit the lifecycle page.

Below left is Xylocopa violacea, a carpenter bee. This is the type of bee that drills holes in wood. In some species the males are territorial and will chase away anything that approaches "their" emerging females. That something could be you!

Recently there have been proposals to introduce bumblebees into Australia to pollinate crops in glasshouses. Now, though I dearly love bumblebees, I do think that this might not be a very good idea. No matter what security measures are taken, mated queens WILL escape eventually and that will probably lead to their establishment in the wild. And yet another non-native invasion of a country that has suffered more than most from such things. This invasion may or may not be benign, but isn't it better to err on the side of caution?

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