Short-haired bumblebee

How to recognise it

A large, long-tongued bumblebee, largely dark with a dull yellow collar and a second faint yellow band, and a buff-white tail. Short even hair gives it a neat, almost velvety appearance.

• Short, even, neat hair — the character the name records.
• Dull yellowish bands rather than bright ones, on a largely dark body.
• Long-tongued, and seen feeding head-first on red clover and vetches.
• In Britain, only in the Dungeness and Romney Marsh reintroduction area.

Body length 13–22 mm (typically 17 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

40–150 individuals

Colony lifespan

One season.

Winter

Mated new queens overwinter alone underground.

Castes

Queen, Workers, Males, New queens

Nesting

Burrows in the ground

Nests underground, typically in abandoned rodent burrows in unimproved grassland.

Carries pollen

Corbicula (pollen basket) on the hind leg

On the wing

May to September

Lifecycle

1. 1Late emergenceQueens emerge in May, considerably later than most bumblebees, and the colony cycle runs through high summer.May to June.
2. 2Legume-dependent seasonColonies build on red clover, vetches and other deep-corolla legumes, and have few substitutes for them.
3. 3ReproductionReproductives appear from late summer.

Where it lives and what it does

Habitat

Unimproved flower-rich grassland, particularly coastal grazing marsh and downland with abundant legumes.

Distribution

Across Europe and into Asia. Extinct in Britain from around 1988, formally declared so in 2000, and subject to reintroduction at Dungeness from 2012 using Swedish stock.

Behaviour

A long-tongued legume specialist with a late, short season — the same combination that has put the great yellow and shrill carder bumblebees in trouble. Its British extinction is directly attributable to the collapse of red clover in farming rotations after nitrogen fertiliser arrived.

Pollination role

An effective pollinator of deep-corolla legumes, and historically valuable enough that it was deliberately shipped to New Zealand in the 1880s to pollinate red clover seed crops that were otherwise failing.

High on legumes, and negligible in Britain by virtue of near-absence.

What it forages on

Deep-corolla legumes above all — red clover, vetches, bird's-foot trefoil and sainfoin.

Honey

Keeps only a few days of stores

A few days' worth in wax pots.

Relationship with people

How people interact with it

The reintroduction is worth understanding properly. Early attempts to source New Zealand descendants of the original 1880s shipments found the population too genetically depleted, so Swedish stock was used instead. Crucially, the project spent years restoring flower-rich habitat across Romney Marsh before releasing anything — and the clearest measurable success has been the recovery of other rare bumblebees on that restored habitat, including the shrill carder and the moss carder.

Conservation

Extinct in Britain and the subject of an active reintroduction. Across its wider European range it has declined substantially for the same reason: the loss of legume-rich grassland.