Garden bumblebee

How to recognise it

A large bumblebee with three yellow bands — one on the front of the thorax, one at the back of it, and one at the front of the abdomen — and a clean white tail. The very long face and visibly extended tongue in flight are the reliable characters; the banding alone is shared with several relatives.

• A distinctly long face, unlike the round face of the buff-tailed and white-tailed bumblebees.
• Tongue held out straight in flight and clearly visible.
• Three yellow bands plus a white tail — but check the face, because the banding is not diagnostic on its own.
• Seen feeding head-first deep into foxgloves, comfrey and honeysuckle where other bumblebees are robbing from the side.

Body length 11–22 mm (typically 16 mm).

Biology

Social organisation

Eusocial, colony dies each autumn

A true colony with a queen and workers, but only for one season: everyone dies in autumn except mated new queens, who overwinter alone. Bumblebees.

Colony size at peak

50–150 individuals

Colony lifespan

One season, and a small colony by bumblebee standards.

Winter

Mated new queens overwinter alone in soil or leaf litter; everyone else dies in autumn.

Castes

Queen, Workers, Males, New queens

Nesting

Burrows in the ground; Existing cavities and tubes

Nests at or just below ground level in old rodent burrows, under sheds, in compost heaps and in dense tussocky grass. Colonies are small — often under a hundred workers — which makes them harder to find and more vulnerable to a single bad spell of weather.

Carries pollen

Corbicula (pollen basket) on the hind leg

On the wing

March to September

Lifecycle

1. 1Queen emergenceQueens emerge in spring and search for a nest site, feeding heavily on early deep flowers such as lungwort and comfrey.March to May.
2. 2Colony growthA relatively small colony builds through early summer, timed to the peak of legume and foxglove flowering.
3. 3ReproductionMales and new queens are produced in late summer, mate, and only the queens survive to hibernate.

Where it lives and what it does

Habitat

Gardens, hedgerows, unimproved grassland, woodland edge and any landscape with abundant deep-flowered plants.

Distribution

Across Europe and into western Asia, and introduced to New Zealand in the nineteenth century specifically to pollinate red clover.

Behaviour

Fast and purposeful, and it works deep flowers head-first where other bumblebees hover at the base looking for a hole to bite. Its introduction to New Zealand is one of the more deliberate pieces of pollinator management in history: red clover seed crops failed there until long-tongued bumblebees were shipped out in 1885, and the descendants of those colonies still pollinate New Zealand clover today.

Pollination role

The key pollinator of deep-corolla plants in Europe — red clover, foxglove, comfrey, vetches, honeysuckle and many garden salvias. Where it is absent, those plants are visited mostly by nectar robbers that pollinate nothing, so its decline has consequences well beyond the bee itself.

Very high on deep-flowered plants, and functionally irreplaceable for several of them.

What it forages on

Strongly favours deep tubular flowers that its tongue length opens up — legumes above all, plus foxglove, comfrey, dead-nettle and honeysuckle.

Honey

Keeps only a few days of stores

A few days' worth of ripened nectar in wax pots. An annual colony has no winter to store for.

Relationship with people

How people interact with it

A garden bee that most people have seen without identifying, and one of the species behind the argument that bumblebee decline is really a decline of the long-tongued specialists rather than of bumblebees generally.

Conservation

Declining across parts of its European range, in step with the loss of red clover, vetches and unimproved flower-rich grassland. Long-tongued bumblebees have fallen far more sharply than short-tongued ones, and the reason is straightforwardly that their food plants have.