Bumblebees you may spot in your garden this spring and summer

With warmer weather comes the inevitable buzz of spring and summer: the bumblebee.

Currently, there are 24 species of bumblebee in the UK, just one species of honeybee, and over 250 species of solitary bee.

Eight species (a third of those remaining) are currently listed on at least one of the English, Welsh and Scottish conservation priority species lists due to their large-scale declines in distribution.

A spokesperson for the Bumblebee Conservation Trust, which aims to preserve and protect bumblebees, said: “Bumblebees are our best-known, best-studied, best-recorded wild bees and we know from distribution records that they have been in decline for a century in terms of the area occupied.

“It’s pretty difficult to get local data on what’s happening to bumblebees, but data from our national recording scheme, BeeWalk, which relies on volunteer citizen scientists, shows us that it’s a mixed picture nationwide and would almost certainly be a mixed picture in Rochdale.

“Our most recent BeeWalk report showed Buff-tailed, Early and Garden aren’t doing too well, but some of the other common bumblebees are fine, and some of our rare bumblebees, such as the Bilberry, that hang around in the Peak District, are doing reasonably well."

 

 

BeeWalk is a standardised bumblebee-monitoring scheme that involves volunteer ‘BeeWalkers’ walking the same fixed route once a month between March and October, counting the bumblebees seen and identifying them to species and caste (queen, worker, male) where possible.

Seven species of bumblebee (the ‘Big 7’) are widespread across most of Britain – including the Rochdale borough – and could be seen in your local gardens and parks.

The Big 7 include:

• Red-tailed (Bombus lapidarius)
• Early (Bombus pratorum)
• Common carder (Bombus pascuorum)
• White-tailed (Bombus lucorum)
• Buff-tailed (Bombus terrestris)
• Garden (Bombus hortorum)
• Tree (Bombus hypnorum)

You can identify the bees in your garden here and see how many different species visit you:

• www.bumblebeeconservation.org/identify-a-bumblebee/