Bumblebees

Bumblebees - Bombus in latin - the teddy bears of the meadow. You may think a bumblebee is a bumblebee, but there are 250 species in the world - many difficult to tell apart. The queens make a nest in the Spring, where they find a hole in the ground. Female workers hatch from their eggs, and forage to fill small thimble-like honey pots. Later the males hatch for mating, to continue the cycle. Meadows are perfect for bumblebees - flowering all year round to supply protein in pollen and energy in nectar (the bees help pollinate the plants) and lots of old vole holes in which to make nests.

The common bumblebee design you will see is two gold stripes and a white tail. But in Switzerland this could be any of three species: Bombus terrestris (the one used in greenhouses to pollinate vegetables), B. lucorum or B.soroeensis. Below are some stripey jumpers that gorged on our knapweed, marjoram and lavender this summer - there's a bumblebee identifiction link at the side if you're feeling adventurous.

If a bumblebee only has an orange-red tail, it can only bee B. lapidarius or B. ruderarius. The latter has a rounded abdomen and orange hairs on the tibia of the hid legs (where the pollen is gathered) - and I think the bumblebee below ticks these boxes.

 And I guess this is a male of one of these species, as it has some yellow at the front.

And the females below - B. lapidarius or B. ruderarius? Just to confuse matters, there is a cuckoo bumblebee - B. rupestris - whose queens kill the queens of B. lapidarius and take over the nest, using the workers there to feed their young. Of course the female cuckoo bumblebee needs to look like B.lapidarius to be accepted by the workers - and the male looks the same.

And there are bumblebees which are entirely pale ginger-brown. I think this is B. muscorum - but it could be B. pascuorum or B. humilis.

The only way to identify bumblebees with certainty is to kill them and look at the shapes of their genitalia! Maybe next year...