Bumblebee
(Bombus species)
Bumblebees are flying insects, identifiable by their yellow and black bodies and their distinctive ‘buzz’. Bumblebees are bigger, hairier and fly more deliberately and with a lower-pitched buzz than most similar fly species. A bumblebee has four wings.
Eighteen species are social species. They make nests, collect pollen and have a worker caste. The remaining six species have a parasitic lifestyle, taking over existing nests established by other species. These species are known as ‘cuckoo’ bumblebees and don’t have workers, just queens and males. They tend to be widespread but only at a comparatively low abundance.
Fascinating fact:
Bumblebees do not make honey.
As bumblebees only feed on flowers, they need far more plants than equivalent species that also eat leaves or roots. Because of their colony-based lifestyle, they need to have enough flowers available to sustain 40–400 sterile worker bees for the lifespan of the colony (potentially several months during March to October). This activity enables the production of new reproductive individuals – males and queens – at the end of the colony’s lifecycle.
Threats
Bumblebees are in serious decline due to degradation and loss of habitat. Actions which reduce the number of flowers in the countryside, from replacing a clover-rich horse paddock with a tractor shed in the 1950s, to widespread herbicide use and mowing road verges fortnightly in the 2010s, have detrimentally affected bumblebee numbers (97 per cent of flower-rich meadows have been lost since 1937).
Did you know
The word ‘bumble’ was originally used to describe the ‘buzz’ of bees. Bumble then was adapted to describe awkward movement (‘to bumble along’), reflecting the flight of bees. In southern England it used to be called a ‘Dumbledore’ (as in Harry Potter). Its Latin name Bombus means booming.