Eusocial bees whose colony dies each autumn

Bees living this way. Around ninety per cent of bee species are solitary, and the social ones people picture when they think of bees are a small and unrepresentative minority.

21 records · social structure

BumblebeesBombusLarge, furry, loud, and cold-tolerant in a way no honey bee is. Bumblebees run annual colonies: a mated queen emerges alone in spring, founds a nest by herself, raises workers through the summer, produces new queens and males in late season, and then the entire colony dies except those new queens. They do make honey, in the strict sense of ripened nectar stores — just a few days' worth, because they have no winter to survive as a colony.
Buff-tailed bumblebeeBombus terrestrisThe commonest bumblebee in Europe, the one reared commercially by the million for tomato pollination, and — as a consequence of that trade — an invasive species on several continents. It is also the bee behind the winter bumblebees now active through December and January in mild British cities, which is a genuine and recent behavioural change.
Tree bumblebeeBombus hypnorumA bumblebee that was entirely absent from Britain until 2001 and is now one of the commonest in gardens across England and Wales — one of the best-documented range expansions of any insect. It is also the bumblebee most likely to nest in a bird box, and the one responsible for the clouds of males hovering outside them in early summer, which alarms people considerably more than it should.
Garden bumblebeeBombus hortorumThe longest-tongued common bumblebee in Europe, and the one that can feed legitimately from flowers every other bee has to rob. A garden bumblebee's tongue can exceed 15 mm — nearly three times a honey bee's — and it flies with it extended in front like a lance. That single anatomical fact makes it the key pollinator of deep-flowered plants such as red clover, foxglove, comfrey and honeysuckle, and it is also why the species has declined as those plants have.
Common carder beeBombus pascuorumThe ginger bumblebee that is still flying in November when everything else has finished, and one of the few common bumblebees that has held its ground while others declined. It is a moderately long-tongued species, it nests on the surface rather than underground, and it combs moss and dry grass over the nest — the carding behaviour its name records.
Red-tailed bumblebeeBombus lapidariusA striking black bumblebee with a bright orange-red tail, and one of the most recognisable insects in a European summer. The queens are large, entirely velvet-black except for the tail, and the males are quite different animals to look at — smaller, with bright yellow facial hair and yellow bands that lead people to report two species where there is one.
Early bumblebeeBombus pratorumThe smallest and quickest of the common bumblebees, and the one that gets its whole year over with early. Early bumblebee colonies emerge in March, reach reproduction by June and are finished by midsummer — which means the species is often producing new queens while other bumblebees are still building. In a warm year it manages a second generation.
Great yellow bumblebeeBombus distinguendusA large, uniformly straw-yellow bumblebee that was once found across most of Britain and is now confined to the far north and west — the Hebrides, Orkney, the north Scottish coast and a handful of Irish sites. Its decline is one of the best-documented in any British insect, and the cause is unusually clear: it is a long-tongued specialist of flower-rich hay meadow, and Britain lost almost all of that.
White-tailed bumblebeeBombus lucorumOne of the commonest bumblebees in northern Europe, and one that has quietly become three. Genetic work has split Bombus lucorum into a complex of at least three species — lucorum, cryptarum and magnus — that cannot reliably be separated in the field. It is a short-tongued generalist, an accomplished nectar robber, and one of the earliest bumblebees on the wing.
Shrill carder beeBombus sylvarumOne of Britain's rarest bumblebees, reduced to a handful of scattered populations in south Wales, the Thames estuary, Salisbury Plain and Somerset. It is named for its high-pitched buzz, which is genuinely distinctive, and it is a late-emerging long-tongued specialist of exactly the flower-rich grassland Britain has almost entirely lost.
Short-haired bumblebeeBombus subterraneusThe bumblebee Britain lost and tried to get back. Declared extinct in the UK in 2000, it became the subject of a reintroduction programme using stock from New Zealand — where it had been shipped in the 1880s to pollinate red clover and had survived — and then from Sweden. The project is one of the more instructive conservation stories in entomology, including in what it revealed about doing habitat first.
Rusty patched bumblebeeBombus affinisThe first bumblebee listed as endangered under the United States Endangered Species Act, in 2017. It was common across the eastern and midwestern United States within living memory and has declined by something close to 90% in range since the late 1990s — a collapse fast enough and complete enough that pathogen spillover from commercially reared bumblebees is among the leading explanations.
Giant Patagonian bumblebeeBombus dahlbomiiThe largest bumblebee in the world — queens exceed 40 mm — and one of the clearest documented cases of a managed bee destroying a native one. Endemic to the temperate forests of southern Chile and Argentina, it was abundant within living memory and has collapsed across most of its range since commercial European bumblebees were imported for glasshouse tomato pollination in the 1980s and 1990s.
Heath bumblebeeBombus jonellusA small, neat, short-faced bumblebee of heathland, moorland and coastal dune, and one of the few British species that regularly produces two generations in a season. It looks like a miniature garden bumblebee and is separated from it by the face: short and round rather than long.
Moss carder beeBombus muscorumA pale gingery carder bee of coastal grassland, machair and marsh, and one of Britain's declining species. It is a long-tongued legume specialist that nests at the surface, cards moss and grass over the nest, and depends on exactly the flower-rich unimproved grassland that has largely gone.
Bilberry bumblebeeBombus monticolaAn upland bumblebee with an unusually extensive orange-red tail covering more than half the abdomen, tied closely to bilberry on moorland and mountain. It is one of the clearest British examples of a species retreating uphill, and its lowland populations have largely gone.
Brown-banded carder beeBombus humilisA scarce gingery carder bee of unimproved grassland, coastal grazing marsh and brownfield land, and one of the group of British bumblebees whose decline tracks the loss of flower-rich grassland almost exactly. It is difficult to separate in the field from the common carder bee, which is part of why its status took so long to establish.
Ruderal bumblebeeBombus ruderatusBritain's largest bumblebee and one of its scarcest, a long-tongued legume specialist that declined severely through the twentieth century. It was also shipped to New Zealand and Chile in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to pollinate red clover, and in Chile it became one of the introduced species implicated in the collapse of the native giant bumblebee.
Arctic bumblebeeBombus polarisThe northernmost bee in the world, nesting within a few hundred kilometres of the pole on Ellesmere Island and northern Greenland. It survives by being the most effective thermoregulator of any insect — a queen can hold her thorax above 30 °C in air near freezing — and by compressing a whole colony cycle into an Arctic summer of a few weeks.
Western bumblebeeBombus occidentalisOnce among the commonest bumblebees of western North America and now scarce across much of that range, in a decline that began abruptly in the late 1990s. It was also reared commercially for glasshouse pollination until production collapsed from disease — which is the same period, and probably not a coincidence.
Common eastern bumblebeeBombus impatiensNorth America's commercially reared bumblebee, produced by the million for glasshouse tomato and berry pollination, and the continent's counterpart to Europe's buff-tailed bumblebee in both usefulness and controversy. It is abundant, adaptable and thriving while several of its relatives collapse — and its commercial rearing is implicated in some of those collapses.

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