Bumblebee Pictures
Where thou art is clime for me.
Ralph Waldo Emerson The Humble-Bee
Our familiarity and fondness for the humble bumblebee often starts and ends with our observations of its movement from flower to flower on a sunny day.
Further investigations tell us that bumblebees (genus Bombus) are social insects that belong to the same family as honey bees (Apidae).
Their nests are built underground and consist of the traditional bee colony structure, queen, workers and drones.
A day's work for the bumblebee usually consists of pollinating flowers, and also using the pollen as a food source for their young.
Their pollinating activities place them squarely on the list of beneficial insects. Unfortunately, the humble beneficence of the bumblebee has led humans to create a situation causing great stress on some native bumblebee populations.
Franklin's Bumblebee (Bombus franklini), a native species of Southern Oregon and Northern California, for example, is listed as critically endangered on the IUCN Red List. Population declines of other native species are also being recorded around the world.
Researchers hypothesize that the introduction of non-native species into the commercial market solely for pollination, also introduced the diseases associated with the commercial bumblebees. As the commercial bumblebees escaped into the wild, the mites and viruses associated with them began afflicting native bumblebee populations.
Increased pesticide use and habitat alteration which reduces the number of native flowering plants associated with native bumblebee species are also hypothesized as factors contributing to bumblebee population stress.
Because of the population problems, native bumblebee identification has moved to the top of the agenda for many professional entomologists and insect enthusiasts.
Identifying bumblebee species involves following a set of rules that are similar to other insect identification tasks.
Their body consists of a head, thorax and abdomen, and different species show different hair colors and patterns along the thorax and abdomen.
The top picture, for example, shows a species with a large black section at the bottom of the abdomen and a white hairy section on the thorax and top of the abdomen.
Without a better view of the tip of the abdomen and the top of the thorax, an accurate identification is problematic. It could, for example, be the Half-black Bumble Bee (Bombus vagans)
The links in the box point to articles that contain pictures and brief descriptions of a handful of species because helping native bumblebees begins by identifying native bumblebees.
© 2005-2010 Patricia A. Michaels