This was by some way the biggest bumblebee I’ve ever seen – easily as long as the end phalanx of my thumb, and heavily built. For scale, check out the honeysuckle leaf she was sitting on. If she’d been in any way aggressive I’d probably have been worried, but she was intent on feeding and ignored me completely.
This isn’t the easiest species to identify, and it doesn’t help that she was a bit shabby, but experience, and her sheer bulk, tell me that she’s a Large Garden Bumblebee (Bombus ruderatus). This species is closely related to the Small Garden Bumblebee (Bombus hortorum), which might more appropriately be called the Smaller Garden Bumblebee, because by any measure other than comparison to Bombus ruderatus it’s actually quite big. When B. ruderatus is wearing the classically described bands of yellow, black and white, the two are hard to tell apart except by size and the fact that B. hortorum is usually a bit shaggier, but B. ruderatus tends towards melanic or semi-melanic variants, and round these parts they’re usually much darker than their cousins. They also have longer faces – which is a difficult feature to use in isolation unless you spend your life examining bees, but in my second image you can see her face, and the long tongue she was using to drink from the honeysuckle tube.
Large Garden Bumblebee queens tend to overwinter in old rodent burrows, and emerge relatively late in the spring, and the fact that this one is feeding rather than foraging suggests that she’d only quite recently woken up. She’ll build her nest in a similar burrow, and when established it will be quite large, with up to a hundred workers. The males and new queens will emerge any time between July and October. In my garden the males are often black, with just a little tuft of ginger hair at the mandibles, and this makes them easily identifiable.
I’m always pleased to see Bombus ruderatus because it suffered a near-catastrophic decline during the C20th, and by the 1980s was pretty much confined to the south-east of England, including the Fens. Since then it has staged a partial recovery, spreading north and west, and is now pretty well established across the Midlands. Due to the difficulties of identifying it from photos alone, I suspect that it’s under-recorded, and probably more numerous than its “Nationally scarce” designation suggests. It has benefitted from recent agri-environment schemes which promote the sowing of wild flower edges around arable fields, and if more people neglected their gardens in the way I’m happy to do, it would probably do better yet. My top tip for attracting Ruderal Bumblebees: they adore red clover, dead nettles, and ground ivy.
R: C1 D17.
