Pantaloon bee

How to recognise it

A medium bee with a dark body, pale abdominal hair bands, and hind legs carrying vast plumes of long golden-orange hair. The pollen brushes are so large they are visible from a metre away and are entirely diagnostic.

• Enormous golden hair fans on the hind legs — nothing else in Europe looks like this.
• Found on sandy soil: heathland, dunes, brownfield sites and sandy banks.
• Flies June to September, on composites.
• Females excavate burrows with a distinctive fan-shaped spray of excavated sand at the entrance.

Body length 12–15 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

Digs burrows up to 60 cm deep in light sandy soil, working the excavated sand backwards with the hind legs to produce a characteristic fan of spoil at the entrance. Nests in loose aggregations on heathland, dunes and brownfield land.

Carries pollen

Scopa — dense hairs on the hind leg

On the wing

June to September

Lifecycle

1. 1EmergenceAdults emerge in midsummer, timed to composite flowering.June to July.
2. 2ProvisioningThe female collects composite pollen in the leg fans and forms it into a spherical loaf standing on three small legs of pollen at the bottom of the cell — an unusual construction whose function is thought to be keeping the provision clear of damp sand.
3. 3OverwinteringThe larva develops on the provision and overwinters underground.Roughly ten months.

Where it lives and what it does

Habitat

Heathland, coastal dunes, sandy brownfield land, quarries and sandy grassland. It needs light soil it can dig deeply into.

Distribution

Across Europe. In Britain, largely coastal and southern, on sandy soils.

Behaviour

Fast and low over open sand, and the loaded females are unmistakable. It is a composite specialist, working ragwort, hawkbits, catsear and knapweed, and it will not substitute readily — which ties it to open sandy ground with abundant yellow composites.

Pollination role

An effective pollinator of composites on sandy and heathland sites, where the flora depends heavily on a small set of specialist bees.

High on its host family, and negligible outside it.

What it forages on

Composites almost exclusively — ragwort, hawkbits, catsear, knapweed and chicory.

Honey

Produces no honey

None. One pollen loaf per cell.

Relationship with people

How people interact with it

Rarely noticed and easy to show to someone once found, because the leg fans make it immediately memorable. Its habitat — open sand with composites — is exactly the sort of ground routinely described as derelict and developed.

Conservation

Localised and declining with the loss of open sandy habitat to development, scrub encroachment and stabilisation of dune systems.