Identifying Species

From my photographs I decided to see if I could identify the different species of Bumble Bees I encountered. Using a species guide provided by bumblebeeconservation.org I began to match up my photos with their species type.
In order to understand how to identify a species I first needed to understand basic bee anatomy.


A bee, like most insects has a body divided into three sections

A Head containing the bees eyes and mouthparts

A Thorax where the bee's legs, wings and wing muscles are located

And An Abdomen which houses the bee's sting and digestive organs 

By understanding which parts of the bee's body have certain hair markings or colours meant I could now make a positive identification. It is also imperative with bee identification that you must look at the hair colours and patterns rather than the body underneath.

Forest Cuckoo Bumble Bee (Bombus sylvestris)

This species categorised as less common. The pattern can vary, however males and females have a yellow stripe on the thorax and none on the abdomen. The end of the abdomen is white with a small black tip that is more noticeable in males. I was convinced whilst identifying this species that there was white stripes present on the abdomen, however I concluded that these were simply the sections of the abdomen rather than the hair itself. 

Common Carder Bee  (Bombus pascuorum)

This Common Carder bee of unknown gender was easy to identify due to it's highly distinctive colour. All Common Carder's are covered brown or ginger  hairs. It does look distinctly similar to the far rarer Moss Carder bee, however the Moss Carder will be completely brown/ginger without any black hairs at all, where as the Common Carder, and the bee in the photograph, have some noticeable black hairs on it's abdomen. 

Tree bumblebee  (Bombus hypnorum)

This buzzy fellow is aTree Bumble Bee of an unidentified gender. The Tree bumble bee has only been present in the UK since 2001 and since then it has spread widely across the country. Both males, females and queens have black heads and abdomens with a ginger/brown thorax. All Tree bees have a white 'tail' at the bottom of their abdomen, the size of this however varies from bee to bee.

Early bumblebee  (Bombus pratorum) 

or

Red-tailed bumblebee  (Bombus lapidarius)

I think this is either a worker Early Bumblebee or a male Red Tailed. The quality of the picture makes it very difficult to see whether the bee has a yellow head or not and the wings seem to slightly obscure the end of the thorax so it's also difficult to notice if there's a second yellow band. Either way both species have distinctive red tails. The lack of yellow banding and ability to see the head makes me lean towards this guy being an Early, however Early workers are said to be considerably smaller than most other bees and this bee doesn't seem to be noticeably small, which makes me think it may in fact be a Red Tailed male.