White-tailed bumblebee
The white-tailed bumblebee is a big, fluffy, black bumblebee with a yellow collar, a yellow band and a bright white tail. It is one of the first bumblebees to wake up in spring. You can find it almost anywhere there are flowers.
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Fun facts
The queen wakes up from her winter sleep as early as February and flies low, looking for a hole to start a nest.
It often makes its nest underground in an old mouse or vole hole, and a nest can have up to 400 worker bees.
The queen is the biggest bee in the nest, up to about 2 centimetres long.
There are three kinds of bumblebee that look almost exactly the same, so even experts find them hard to tell apart.
Most asked questions about White-tailed bumblebee
?Where do white-tailed bumblebees nest?
Usually underground, often in old mouse or vole holes.
?How big is a white-tailed bumblebee?
Workers are about 1,2 to 1,8 centimetres long, and the queen can be up to about 2,2 centimetres.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Bombus lucorum
- Named by
- Linnaeus, 1761
- Group
- Bees and bumblebees
- Family
- Apidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Hymenoptera > Apidae
- Lives on
- Europe, Asia, North America
Where the facts come from
- Bombus lucorum (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0): what it looks like, where it lives, what it eats, sizes and fun facts, retold in simple words.
- Picture by Ivar Leidus. CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons. The round sticker of this bug is cut from the same picture.
If we got something wrong, sorry, we are bug fans, not a science journal. Tell us at hello@bugwiki.app and we will fix it.
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