Bombus pascuorum has a medium length tongue and can often be found foraging on clovers, vetches, blackberries, and later in the year on thyme sage and lavender. It often nests at the base of a tussock of grass, and some say it can be aggressive when disturbed, even chasing after people. However when observed during foraging it is no more aggressive than any of the other species. The workers and males look similar to the queen, but are a little smaller. The photgraph on the left was sent in to me by a visitor to the site, and shows typical behaviour of scrabbling around in grass, and pulling bits into their nests.

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.