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 box 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.

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.

Bees and Einstein

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.

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?

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.

The photograph on the left clearly shows the front and rear wings of a worker. Also this photograph was taken of a north-facing Paris windowbox - showing that even in the most unforgiving aspect you can grow flowers that will feed and attract insects. When siting a nest box it is important to take the food source into consideration. A garden full of flowers with long corollas would be a perfect place for the rarer long-tongued bumblebees, and these generally have much smaller nests. Whereas the shorted tongued bumblebees tend to be underground or ground nesters and prefer more open flowers.

Pink38 is the name of the bee pictured on the right. I caught and marked her just after 10 o'clock on the morning of 4th August 1995 while she was foraging on Cirsium arvense (thistle). I saw her another 10 times over the next few days, always on the same clump of thistles, or on a nearby clump of Centaurea nigra (knapweed). Pink38 wasn't special in any way. I marked 232 bumblebees between the 2nd and 6th of August 1995, and saw 58.6% again at least once. A week or two later, after I'd finished all the work, I went out with my camera to find the lane still full of bumblebees with numbers on their backs. Pink38 was just outside the door as usual, on her clump of thistles.