Jun 2
Bumble butt !! Common carder bee on my viper's bugloss, or maybe more so in it ?
(Bombus pascuorum, female imago, worker on Echium vulgare)
21.vii.2024
seen from Estonia
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seen from Italy
seen from China
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seen from United States
Bumble butt !! Common carder bee on my viper's bugloss, or maybe more so in it ?
(Bombus pascuorum, female imago, worker on Echium vulgare)
21.vii.2024
A cutie :]
[ID: Two pictures of a common carder bee (Ackerhummel [bombus pascuorum]) sitting on a cornflower. End ID]
Bumblebee/humla (a Common carder bee/åkerhumla, if I’m not mistaken) on a Tufted vetch/kråkvicker. Värmland, Sweden (June 18, 2023).
Common carder bumblebee (Bombus pascuorum) photos I took 12/05/2024, Wakefield, West Yorkshire, UK
@smolskye submitted: hello mister bugperday! I was walking in Portland OR USA and found a wide variety of bees and wasps at these flowers. I recognized and searched up some western yellow jackets, euro honeybees, and multiple bumblebee species, but I can't find anything about this fuck off HUGE unit that accompanied them! i would say it was about 1 to 1.5 inches long. it was buzzing around so fast I could barely take a photo, and it kept landing on top of the other bugs, but it didn't seem to hurt them. do you have any idea what this large fellow might be? thank you!!
Love the implication that my first name is Onenice and my last name is Bugperday.
Anyhoo this fella looks like a European woolcarder bee, Anthidium manicatum. Despite the name they are indeed found in your location. They're called wooldcarders or carder bees because they strip the hairs off of the leaves like the ones you see in your photo and use it as nesting material. Males are also super territorial, and will attack any bugs in their territory, which is probably the behavior you saw with him landing on other bugs. Males can't sting, but they can bite and harass!
#2640 - Anthidium manicatum - European Woolcarder Bee
Accidentally introduced to many other parts of the world, where they've spread rapidly. They arrived in Aotearoa in 2006.
Best known for their habit of collecting the hair off particularly woolly plants like Lamb's-ear (Stachys sp.) - I'm pretty sure it's on a Stachys in the photo. The bundle is then carried back to their burrow to line the cell walls.
Unusually for a bee, the males are larger than the females, and highly territorial. This is probably related to the fact that the females are polyandrous, and the eggs are more likely to be fertilised by the sperm of her most recent mate. This is a strong evolutionary pressure to produce bees that can monopolise all the mates in their area, by driving off any rivals.
Lake Tekapo, Aotearoa New Zealand.
Bombus veteranus. A floofy carder bee from the Netherlands. English common names are a bit floofy themselves as you can see these can be called carder bumble bees, bumble bees, or the slightly unfashionable bumblebee. Go back further and you will find yourself reading about humblebees too. The species is also in flux with many populations disappearing.
Common Carder Bee
A common carder bee feeding on a sunlit purple toadflax flower, in the garden.