Garden Bumblebee

Bombus hortorum is one of the most common bumblebees in the UK. It's also one of the biggest, with queens coming in at close to 2cm in length, and males and workers at around 1.5cm. It's commonly called the Garden Bumblebee, or sometimes the Small Garden Bumblebee to distinguish it from its very similar cousin Bombus ruderatus, the Large Garden Bumblebee - a species which in fact (sigh) is only very slightly bigger.

Bombus hortorum is one of the later bees to appear each spring - in the Midlands queens tend to emerge from hibernation and found their nests some time in April, with workers appearing in May and males and new queens being released in about July. This, I think, is a very fresh male (I'm really bad at sexing bumblebees, but however I squint at that hind leg I can't make it look the right shape to be a female's), so he's out earlier than would usually be considered normal, but that's credibly down to the hot dry spring we've had. The average life span of an individual nest is around fourteen weeks; after the new queens emerge the rest of the colony dies, but it's thought that under favourable conditions those new queens might immediately start their own nests, rather than overwintering and nesting the following spring.

Bombus ruderatus emerges from hibernation even later than its cousin, and here it tends towards the melanic form. I still couldn't absolutely swear to this specimen being one or the other (a problem that isn't peculiar to me: BWARS state that the records they receive of the two species are so mixed up that they're finding it hard to produce accurate distribution maps, particularly of the less common Large Garden Bumblebee), but he's untidy enough to be Bombus hortorum, and that's the statistically more likely species, so I'm going to stick with my instinct and record him as such.

If you've managed to stick with me through all of the above, you deserve an interesting fact about Bombus hortorum: it has the longest tongue of any British bumblebee, stretching to 1.5 or even 2cm - in other words, as long as the bee itself.  Because of this it tends to visit deep-throated flowers such as this wallflower, where it can reach the nectary that shorter-tongued species can't access. Other favourite flowers include foxgloves, honeysuckle, vetches, and lamiums. Its particular favourite, when available, is red clover.

There's a lot more information about Bombus hortorum in this wiki, if you're not already facted out.