Bumblebees are bumbling about at present
ALTHOUGH March was generally a cold and wet month, bumblebees were on the wing and anyone with an interest in the natural world must have noticed them as they are large and conspicuous insects.
The verb to bumble means to blunder awkwardly, muddle, stumble or stagger. While bumblebees have stout and chubby bodies, and while they are not the most graceful fliers in the insect world, to call their flight bumbling is a tad extreme.
We have about one hundred distinct species of bee in Ireland. Most them are solitary species meaning that they live on their own for most of the time, and the other twenty per cent or so are social meaning that they live communally in groups like honey bees in a hive.
All bumblebees are social, and twenty-one species have been recorded in Ireland. They are divided into bumblebees, cuckoo bees that parasitise bumblebee nests, and carder bees that comb material together to form a cover for their nests in a technique that is similar to the process of carding in the textile industry.
Telling the males, females and workers of all twenty-one species apart takes time, patience, dedication and skill but anyone with a passing interest can narrow an unidentified species down to one of three groups depending on the colour of its rear end. Bumblebees are hairy insects and the band of hairs at the rear of the abdomens can be white, buff or orange-red. The Whitetailed Bumblebee and the Buff-tailed Bumblebee are both very common species.
The body of a typical insect is divided into three distinct regions: head, thorax and abdomen. The head obviously bears the insects’ eyes, mouth parts, and antennae. The middle, thorax or chest region bears the wings and legs, and the abdomen is the large rear region behind the wings and legs. Unlike wasps, bumblebees don’t have a waist between the thorax and abdomen.
Bumblebees die with the onset of winter except for mated queens that overwinter in a safe dry spot like a hole in a ditch. The pregnant queens emerge from hibernation in March and on sunny days are on the wing, bumbling about with a lazy drone as they look for a suitable site to build a nest and start the next generation.