Long-horned bee

How to recognise it

A robust, furry bee of roughly honey bee size, gingery-brown with pale abdominal bands. The males are unmistakable: antennae as long as or longer than the body, swept back in flight.

• Male antennae longer than the body — nothing else in Britain looks like this.
• Robust and gingery, flying May to July on legumes.
• Females with dense pollen brushes on very hairy hind legs.
• Found on unimproved grassland with abundant vetches and clovers.

Body length 13–16 mm (typically 14 mm).

Biology

Social organisation

Solitary

Each female builds and provisions her own nest with no workers and no caste. Most of the world's bee species.

Nesting

Burrows in the ground

Excavates burrows in firm bare or sparsely vegetated ground, often on south-facing slopes, coastal cliffs and unimproved grassland, and frequently in loose aggregations. Cells are lined with a waterproof secretion and provisioned with a firm pollen loaf.

Carries pollen

Scopa — dense hairs on the hind leg

On the wing

May to July

Lifecycle

1. 1Male-first emergenceMales emerge before females, sometimes by a week or more, and patrol the emergence area and forage plants. This male-first pattern is what makes orchid deception viable — it creates a window of frustrated males with no real females available.May.
2. 2NestingFemales provision cells with legume pollen, working alone through early summer.Four to six weeks.
3. 3OverwinteringThe larva develops on its provision and overwinters underground as a prepupa.Roughly ten months.

Where it lives and what it does

Habitat

Unimproved flower-rich grassland, coastal grassland and cliffs, brownfield land and woodland rides with abundant legumes.

Distribution

Across Europe. In Britain, declining and now largely coastal and southern.

Behaviour

Fast, loud and conspicuous. Males patrol favoured legume patches persistently and investigate anything of roughly the right size and scent — which is precisely the behaviour Ophrys orchids exploit. The orchid gets pollinated, the bee gets nothing at all, and the whole arrangement depends on males emerging first.

Pollination role

An important pollinator of legumes, and the pollinator of several Ophrys orchids through pseudocopulation. The orchid relationship is ecologically small and biologically remarkable.

High on legumes, and specifically required by several orchids that have no alternative pollinator.

What it forages on

The pea family above all — vetches, clovers, bird's-foot trefoil and sainfoin.

Honey

Produces no honey

None. Solitary, one provision per cell, no colony and no winter to store for.

Relationship with people

How people interact with it

Barely noticed as an insect and disproportionately famous through the orchids that imitate it. Its decline is a conservation concern for those orchids as much as for the bee.

Conservation

A UK conservation priority species, declining sharply with the loss of unimproved flower-rich grassland and of legumes from farming systems — the same cause as the declining long-tongued bumblebees.