All The Buzz

There are two species, Bombus lucorum - the white-tailed bumblebee, and Bombus terrestris - the buff-tailed bumblebee that are so similar that they were long considered the same species, so this is, er, one of them. My excuse for a wildlife-calendar picture is that the crocuses are those I described planting in one of my first entries, so this is a progress-report picture. They have produced a pleasing splash of colour; I hope the kind (or excessively warm, depending on your degree of climate anxiety) late winter we are having will enable them to gain strength and become fully established. A tick for wildlife-friendly, anyway

This is almost certainly a queen who has aroused from hibernation. She is foraging pollen to feed herself and the first generation of larvae in the completely new colony that she will establish in the coming weeks, quite likely in a hole in the ground (we have had them in the lawn in the past). Like other social bees, including honeybees, the colony comprises a queen, workers and drones (males). In the latter part of the season, it will produce some new queens. These will mate and then find somewhere to hibernate for the winter. The old queen and the rest of the colony will die in the autumn; only the newly mated queens will live through the winter to begin the cycle again.

Honeybees are unique (in UK) in maintaining the (old) queen and the whole colony through the winter (though most of the drones are ejected to their death before winter comes), which is why honeybees are also unique in storing honey to feed themselves in the winter months

There are over 200 species of bee in UK. The 'social' life-cycle I have just outlined fits less than 10 percent of them. The rest are 'solitary' bees that do not form colonies at all and do not have the caste of 'workers'. They over-winter as larvae, pupae or as new, unemerged adults, according to the species, emerging in the spring to mature, mate and lay the next generation of eggs. In some species, mated females over-winter like bumblebees, then lay their eggs in spring and die; the eggs hatch to produce the next generation of mated females to hibernate through the next winter

Two more bumblebee details: there is a now-common species called the tree bumblebee, Bombus hypnorum. This is an invasive species, only arriving in UK in the 21st century. However, it seems to have arrived with very little alarm or fuss, and I have not read any reports of it causing any harm. If you have bumblebees in your bird nest box, it is almost certainly this species. In late summer, when the drones are hovering outside, hoping for the emergence of new queens, these can be quite an alarming presence. Calls to the British Beekeepers Association hotline for reporting (and requesting collection of) honeybee swarms often turn out to be bumble-bees, especially this very visible species

Finally - the climate crisis strikes again - in the warming conditions, and in the southern counties of England, some bumblebee species (including the one pictured) are eschewing hibernation, and new queens are establishing new colonies in the autumn, the workers continuing to forage on whatever they can find over the winter months. My friend on the crocus does not approve of the new fashion