Wow, 3 posts in 3 days, feels like January again! I handed my dissertation in, which means my Masters course is done! No more studying (of course, I like to learn all the time – so no more formal studying! woo!)! Day 4 of my new job and as a consequence of being a general lack of work due to the C word I’ve spent a fair bit of time staring out of my ‘office’ window in between emails. The cherry tree in my garden has just come into blossom and I have noticed a lot of insects visiting, so I got my binoculars from downstairs to see what some of them were, and lo and behold I managed to identify a bumblebee.
What: Buff-tailed Bumblebee Bombus terrestris (Linnaeus, 1758)
When: 6th April 2020
Where: My garden, Poynton, Cheshire, UK
Who saw it? Me.
How was it recorded? I haven’t recorded it yet.
Is it bigger than a blackbird? I’m not even going to dignify that with an answer.
What is it? A large furry member of the bee family, and more specifically a member of the genus Bombus a.k.a the bumblebees. The buff-tailed is a very common bumblebee in the UK but can be hard to identify. At this time of the year they are relatively easy as there are mostly only queens around, and it is they who have the off-white buffy tails. However, the workers and males (who appear later and will be more numerous) have less buff-coloured which look almost white; which makes them almost identical to another species – the White-tailed Bumblebee B. lucorum agg. (the agg. stands for aggregate as this ‘species’ is actually 3 species). I am confident of mine being a buff as I could clearly see the colouring, and as I say the time of year; queens appear first having overwintered as adults, they then find a burrow to lay pre-fertilised eggs from the previous autumn which pass through the larval stage to emerge as worker bees later in the spring. Buff-tails make their nests underground.
A fact about this species: It is usually the first species of bumblebee to emerge in late winter/ early spring.
Is it charismatic in my opinion? I think so (I know I start a lot of these like this!). As far as insects go they are big and obvious. And if one flies into your house you let it out rather than try to swat it. That has to count for something, human respect may be? They always seem busy and determined as they seek out flowers (but this applies to all bumblebees I think).
A Species a Day 