FLIGHT OF THE BUMBLEBEE
The buff-tailed bee
By far the most common bumblebee in almost all the UK and much of Europe, the buff-tailed bumblebee (Bombus terrestris) is probably what most people imagine when they hear the word ‘bumblebee’. The queens, in particular, usually greatly outnumber queens of other species in early spring and are the easiest to identify. Buff-tailed bumblebees are black with two golden-yellow stripes and on the queen a buff-coloured tail. Unhelpfully, the workers have a more-or-less white tail, which makes them almost impossible to distinguish with certainty from the white-tailed bumblebee. It’s not worth getting stressed over – even professionals struggle. The males resemble workers and so are also quite tricky to identify with certainty.
Buff-tailed bumblebees have a short tongue and so tend to visit shallow flowers, but they are also enthusiastic nectar-robbers, using their sharp and powerful mandibles to bite holes in the side or back of deep flowers, such as comfrey and aquilegia, to steal the nectar. They usually nest deep underground, following mole, rabbit or rodent burrows to find safe, cosy cavities. Their nests can get large, containing up to 400 workers. Buff-tailed bumblebees are common in almost any habitat with flowers throughout the British Isles, absent only from the far north-west of Scotland.
You can make any garden into a haven for bumblebees – even a growbag on a balcony can produce copious flowers and attract hungry bees to a nutritious feast. Flowering shrubs and trees, even dwarf-sized versions, can provide an abundance of flowers that far exceeds that of herbaceous plants merely because of their height. Blackthorn (Prunus spinosa) can be grown fairly readily from softwood cuttings, while butterfly bush or buddleia (Buddleja davidii) is especially good for bufftailed bumblebees – I often see young buff-tailed bumblebee queens fattening up before going into hibernation in July and August.