Bumble Bees (Genus: Bombus)

Amwell nature reserve, Herts

I think I am correct in identifying this Bumble bee as Bombus Hortorum although a bee expert may want to correct me. This is one of our most common bees and you should have seen them in London. They live in small annual colonies. The Queens come out in spring and look for new nesting holes, which is what I found this bee doing, they often use old mouse holes. The colonies the queen creates usually don’t contain more than a few hundred workers, these bees are smaller than the queen and will be seen from late spring through to autum. There are over a dozen species of bumble bee that one might find in London and a further six species of Cuckoo bees which are very similar looking but a different genus (Psithyrus) and so called because of their parasitic egg laying quality like their avian namesake. I have not found any common names for these individual species of bee, they are may be identified by their Latin names.