Nature Notebook

Red-tailed bumblebee © Nick Upton 2020VISION

Red-tailed Bumbling Can you help us to help bumblebees by letting us know when you see one...

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Worcestershire Wildlife Trust @WorcsWT t worcestershirewildlifetrust G worcswildlifetrust.co.uk w How could you not love a bumblebee? These furry creatures ‘bumble’ from flower to flower, gathering nectar and pollen. Right now, queens are gathering it to sustain themselves as they start to create their new family; in a few weeks the workers take it back to the nest; later still, the males use it to gain energy for mating; finally, the new queens need it to ensure they can survive the winter.

Red-tailed bumblebees are amongst the easiest of our common bees to recognise. Their name gives the game away - female red-tailed bumbles have an all-black body with a red ‘tail’. The queens can be a couple of centimetres long and you may see those out and about right now as well as later in the year. The female workers are next to appear and, just like their mum, they’re all black with a red tail. A little later in the year, however, males and new queens emerge. Keep a lookout for bumblebees with a red tail, a yellow stripe across their shoulders and a furry yellow face – these are the male bees.

Red-tailed bumblebees have relatively short tongues so look for them on flowers that have a ‘landing platform’ – daisies, dandelions, thistles and the like. Flowers like this are made of many tiny florets that the bee will clamber around on, slurping up the nectar. common bees but our bees are in trouble (loss of habitat and food as well as a vulnerability to pesticides). They’re still widespread in Worcestershire but records of red-tailed bumblebees are rather patchy and reflect where people have been keen to record them rather than where they actually are. In order to get an accurate picture of where they’re found and how they’re doing, we need your help.

If you snap a photo of a red-tailed bumblebee and record it via a short form on our website (www.worcswildlifetrust.co.uk/wildlife-sightings), you can help us to plot the locations of these bumbling insects. Are they more likely to be found in one kind of habitat or another? How important are gardens? Are there genuine gaps in their distribution? The more sightings we receive, the more information we can study to answer these, and more, questions.

A final word of caution! I made a bold statement at the top about red-tailed bumblebees being easy to identify but I misled you a little. Early bumblebees and the much rarer red-tailed cuckoo bees and redshanked carder bees can look similar but don’t worry. That’s why we need a photo of ‘your’ bee, just so we can make sure we get the right record. n To report your sighting of a red-tailed bumblebee, visit www.worcswildlifetrust.co.uk/wildlife-sightings