Shrill carder bee

How to recognise it

A small, pale greenish-grey bumblebee with a dark band between the wing bases and a distinctly orange-red tail. The overall impression is washed-out and greyish, quite unlike the crisp banding of commoner species.

• Pale greenish-grey overall with a dark thoracic band and an orange-red tail.
• A noticeably high-pitched buzz — the character the name records.
• Late emergence, often not until June, and flying into September.
• Restricted range: in Britain, a small number of known populations.

Body length 10–18 mm (typically 14 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

30–120 individuals

Colony lifespan

One short season, starting very late.

Winter

Mated new queens overwinter alone; the colony dies.

Castes

Queen, Workers, Males, New queens

Nesting

Burrows in the ground

Nests at or just below the surface in tussocky grass and rough vegetation, carding surrounding material over the nest as other carder bees do. Colonies are small and easily destroyed by mowing.

Carries pollen

Corbicula (pollen basket) on the hind leg

On the wing

May to September

Lifecycle

1. 1Very late emergenceQueens emerge in late May or June, well after most bumblebees, which compresses the whole colony cycle into a short window.May to June.
2. 2Short colony seasonA small colony builds through high summer on legumes and knapweed.
3. 3Late reproductionMales and new queens appear in late August and September — among the latest of any British bumblebee.

Where it lives and what it does

Habitat

Unimproved flower-rich grassland, coastal grazing marsh, brownfield land and military training areas — the places where agricultural improvement did not reach.

Distribution

Across Europe, and in Britain reduced to a small number of populations in south Wales, the Thames and Severn estuaries, Salisbury Plain and Somerset.

Behaviour

A long-tongued specialist working legumes and knapweed methodically. Its late emergence means it depends entirely on flowers still available in high and late summer, which is precisely the period a cut grassland has nothing.

Pollination role

An important pollinator of grassland legumes where it survives, and now too localised to matter at any scale — which is itself the point.

High on legumes and knapweed, and confined to too small an area to register nationally.

What it forages on

Legumes and knapweed above all — red clover, vetches, bird's-foot trefoil, black horehound and field scabious.

Honey

Keeps only a few days of stores

A few days' worth in wax pots.

Relationship with people

How people interact with it

A UK conservation priority species and a focus of targeted survey and habitat work. Its surviving strongholds are frequently places nobody was farming intensively — brownfield sites, military land, estuary grazing marsh — which is a recurring pattern among Britain's scarcest bees.

Conservation

Among the most threatened bumblebees in Britain. The cause is unambiguous: the loss of flower-rich grassland and of red clover from farming systems, compounded by its late emergence, which leaves it dependent on forage that a July cut removes entirely.