When I was
marking bees in order to follow them and record their
foraging behaviour I found that B. pascuorum was the most difficult to
mark as its thorax was so hairy. Early in the
summer, before it has been bleached by the sun the hairs are a beautiful, rich
ginger colour as you can see in the photographs above.
B. pasucorum nests just below ground in old mammal burrows, or on the surface in gass tussocks. Successful nests can have as many as 150 workers. The cuckoo species is B. campestris.
I believe that this bee is
suffering from the recent habit of farmers cutting their grass for silage in
June/July instead of for hay in August. In Scotland the queens have just
established their nests but have few workers when the nests are destroyed by
the tractor. Some queens will be killed sitting on eggs, others will have the
onerous task of establishing a nest again. Fortunately it is still a fairly
common bee, and is very valuable for pollinating the more "difficult" flowers such as antirrhinum, left, where an inexperienced forager hesitates before plunging into the gullet of the flower allowing the top peral to fully enclose her. Only a heavy and strong insect such as a bumblebee can get into such flowers. |