The Great Yellow Bumblebee
The garden bumblebee (B. hortorum)
The bilberry bumblebee (B. monticola)
The Common Carder Bumblebee (B. pascuorum)
A male Cuckoo-bumblebee (B. vestalis) on knapweed
The Moss Carder Bumblebee (B. muscorum)
The 'tree bumblebee' - a new arrival from France
A Common Carder Bee visiting lavender
A Garden Bumblebee complaining about the Rhododendrons...
A buff-tailed bumblebee feeding on Red Bartsia
What type of bumblebee is this?
Members Photo - By Chris Frear
Members Photo - By Chris Frear
Members Photo - By Chris Frear
Members photo - Jim Welsford
Members photo - Andy Leslie
Members photo - Chris Boyd
Members photos - William McKenzie
Britain's rarest bumblebee, seen here feeding on Red Clover. This bee is litterally on the brink, and urgently needs our protection. Our first reserve in the Hebrides will hopefully be a safe haven for this stunning insect.
She hovers to smell the flower with her antennae. Bumblebees have smelly feet, so she can tell when the flower was last visited by the strength of the foot odour!
This rare and stunning bumblebee is the symbol of the BBCT. It's found on heathland and mountains, and favours areas where bilberry (or blaeberry) is common.
This beautiful creature is busy collecting pollen from bramble, and in the process it is helping to create a healthy crop of blackberries.
Female cuckoo bees wait until true bumblebees have started a nest, and then sneak in... kill the resident queen... and commandeer her workforce. That said, they are a natural part of the ecosystem, and their abundance depends on that of their hosts - they are not part of the problem.
This stunning bee is related to the Common Carder Bee, but unfortunately is now incredibly rare. It is one of the conservation priorities for the BBCT.
We are asking BBCT members to help us monitor the spread of this distinctive bee.
Everyone can help bumblebees by planting cottage garden flowers like lavender, comfrey and foxgloves in their gardens.
Although visually stunning when in flower, Rhododendrons are a non-native invasive species. Bumblebees would much prefer to feed on native plants!
Queens are the large bees you see in spring. She'll soon start a nest in tussocky grass, and instead we'll start to see her helpers, the worker bees
Look at the enormous amount of pollen she has collected. Red Bartsia is the favourite plant of one of our rarest bumblebees, the Shrill-Carder Bee (B. sylvarum).
Any ideas? In fact, it's not a bumblebee at all, it's a fly that's pretending to be a bee. By mimicking a stinging insect so expertly, the fly avoids being eaten by birds.
A male red-tailed bumblebee
A white-tailed bumblebee on a vivid garden flower. Only the 6 'garden bumblebees' thrive on introduced plants. The rarer bees are desperate for native wildflowers.
A Common Carder bumblebee feeding on a thistle
These bumblebees have made their nest under paving slabs in Jim's greenhouse. On sunny days it's so hot that the worker bees sit at the nest entrance fanning their wings to create a cooling draft.
A large colony of the buff-tailed bumblebee took up residence in some old loft insulation in Andy's cellar. The small black bees give you some idea how much of the material they have 'fluffed up'!
A common carder bee feeding on a foxglove. Foxgloves are good food plants for several of the 'long-tongued' bumblebee species, many of which are now very rare.
A lovely photo of 2 types of bumblebee. If you listen carefully you can hear them complaining to one another about the lack of native wildflowers in peoples gardens these days!
