www.bumblebee.org home page

Welcome to www.bumblebee.org. The menu above and on the left will take you to the major sections of the web site. If you are not sure which page you should be looking at try the search box at the top right of this, and every page.

We have a new book out, Recognising Common British bumblebees. It costs just £2.01, so about the same price as a cheap cup of coffee, but much more enjoyable. It includes: How to recognise common British bumblebees Their nesting habits Body sizes Flower preferences of different species The bumblebee colony life cycle The bumblebee body. The book is made for the Kindle Fire as there are many colour photographs, but if you don't have a Kindle Fire you can download one of the free apps for your device from Amazon.

www.bumblebee.org is divided into 8 major areas:

What is a bumblebee?

Bumblebees are large, hairy social 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.

Queen and worker bumblebees can sting, and the photograph above right shows the extended sting of a Bombus lapidarius queen. You don't often see stings as bumblebees are reluctant to use them, and in all my years of working with them I have yet to be stung. For more on stings go to the sting page.

It is believed that the earliest fossilized bumblebee dates from the Oligocene, around 30 million years ago.

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. Apparently Einstein never said this at all. It is just another urban myth. However if bees do die off it is fairly certain that life as we know it will cease with in a short time, and that there will be far fewer humans around, as there will be so much less for them to eat. So a world without bees will probably also be a world with far fewer humans.

For more on what we are doing to our world you can read my rant on global warming and pollution at the bottom of the Invertebrate page.

Where are bumblebees found?

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!

above the sting of a Bombus lapidarius queen, and below a Bombus terrestris/lucorum worker foraging.

List of crops pollinated by bumblebees.

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?

Apparently there are already colonies of Bombus terrestris on Tasmania, so I suppose it is now only a matter of time before they reach the mainland.

The bumblebee body

Above you can see a simple diagram of the bumblebee body naming the various parts. On the body page you can find out about the adaptations to the bumblebee body, and the linked pages go into more detail.

The bumblebee life cycle

A bumblebee colony is started fresh each spring by a queen that has mated the previous year and emerged from hibernation. She first produces workers (females), and eventually males (drones) and queens. At the end of the colony life only the new queens survive to hibernate and start things off next year. For more detail see the life cycle pages.

On the left is a diagram showing the yearly life cycle of a bumblebee colony.

A summer spent following bumblebees

Pink38 is the name of the bumblebee 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, measured tongue length, head length and width of 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, so I took her photograph.

Everything you read on this site stems from that summer.