Two-spotted Bumblebee (Bombus bimaculatus)

Two-spotted Bumblebee (Bombus bimaculatus)
Photo by Brad Sylvester, copyright 2011, all rights reserved
For more photos, click here

Growing up in New England with clover in the lawn, I have certainly seen my share of bees. Although I recall that there used to be far more wild honeybees than I see these days, I do still see a good number of bumblebees in my yard. I see them on the flowers of my squash, peppers, chives and many different flowers all over the yard.  (Let me first say some people use bumble bee as two words and some say bumblebee as one word, I’m going to use the latter variant throughout this page.)

I’ve never really looked closely enough to see what species they were specifically, until now. It turns out that there are quite a few different kinds of bumblebees. My Audubon field guide only lists a few, but it can hardly be blamed as it only covers about 550 insects of the 100,000 or so that live in North America. Whatever species they are, they are certainly welcome in the garden because they seem to be doing a pretty good job of picking up where the missing honeybees have left off in terms of pollinating my vegetable gardens and apple trees.

To figure out what species a bumblebee is, you have to look at the pattern of black and yellow on its head, thorax and abdomen. The best reference for common bumblebee patterns that I’ve found online is this chart from Bumblebee.org. Comparing the photos of bumblebees that I took at about 9:30 a.m. on the sunny morning of July 7^th, 2011, with the grass still wet from evening rains, they appear to be of the species Bombus bimaculatus or the two-spotted bumblebee which therefore becomes the third wild species and second insect added to the master list of What Lives in my Yard? There may be other species as well living in my yard, I’ll be more observant from now on and if I spot a different kind, I’ll make a note of it for this blog.

I’ve included a single picture here on this page, but if you’d like to see a slideshow of the other pictures I took of the two-spotted bumblebee, click here. I’m going to try to put up slideshows of most species from now on to give a wider range of views, and talk about identification a little using the photos. Field guides generally have a single photo and it may be hard to identify one you see given individual differences from the single example.  That’s why I try to take photos from a variety of angles if there is any doubt about the species.

Bumblebees, in general, are pretty easy-going and won’t aggressively attack like a yellow-jacket might. If they do, however, bumblebees have the advantage of being able to sting over and over again since they do not leave their stingers in their victims.

The two-spotted bumblebee, according to bugguide.net, has a long tongue, not unlike a hummingbird’s tongue, that is used to sip nectar from inside long tube flowers. The ones I photographed, however, were collecting pollen. In the photos you can see the pollen sacs on their legs are full and yellow with pollen that will be carried back to the hive. Bombus bimaculatus feeds on both nectar and pollen.

Bumblebees live in ground burrows, and experience a near complete hive die-off each winter. Only the queen survives to re-establish the hive in the spring. Interestingly, the queen bumble bee herself will actually go out and collect pollen for the first new worker bee larva in the spring.

The two-spotted bumblebee lives east of the Mississippi River from southern Canada to Florida.