May 17th, 2007
red-tailed bumblebees
Above and below are my first photos of a Bumblebee for this year. I didn’t mark it down on the calendar, but I may have seen my very first Bumblebee about 2 or 3 weeks ago, but this is the first that I was able to approach close enough to shoot some photos. The first Bumblebees of the season that we see up here in the north are queens, as they are the only bees that overwinter. Later on in the season, we’ll see smaller Bumblebees around and they’re the workers. I don’t know if all of this applies in more southern climes. I guess that’s something I should check into.
As luck would have it, the bee that I photographed on May 15th happened to be one of several species that are referred to as Red-tailed Bees, meaning that the hair on some of their abdominal segments is red rather than the yellow or black that we tend to associate with Bumblebees. I never actually knew that some bees had red segments until I began studying them a lot more closely a few years ago. I also didn’t know that there were so many species of Bumblebees, and that it was possible to identify many of them by determining which abdominal segments were yellow, black or red, and by what kind of markings they had on the head and on the scutum (the top of the thorax behind the head back to between the wings).
As you can see on the bee in these photos, it has a black head and quite a large black marking on the scutum (see below – click on images for larger views). The abdominal sections, beginning just behind the wings are yellow, red, red, yellow and black. That’s all very useful information when you begin trying to identify a Bumblebee. In the past, I used a couple of charts in books, but last year, I found out about the Discover Life Bumblebee Identification Guide and gave it a try. It works quite well. You might want to experiment with it if you are able to observe and record (or photograph) the markings of a bee in your own region. Once you have recorded that information, you just go to the guide and work your way through the key. It’s fairly self-evident how it works – you just click on the appropriate boxes as you work your way down through the key, and then click on “Search”. The guide will attempt to come up with the species that is most likely to be the same as yours. Sometimes, there may be a couple of possible species. In that case, you just click on the links to each of the suggested species and you’ll find a collection of photos that you can compare with your bee. The identification guide suggested that my bee might be either Bombus rufocinctus, or Bombus ternarius. Based on the shape of the scutum markings and a couple of other features, I think that my bee is probably Bombus ternarius.
Anyhow, I hope that some of you will do some Bumblebee-watching and perhaps give the identification guide a whirl as it’s really rather fun.
Note: Here’s a link to a small and very useful little .pdf file that provides definitions for terms relating to bees and their anatomy.
