One of the first wild bees we’ll be spotting in the new year will be the Early Bumblebee… like this one here that we filmed last May.
Early Bumblebees are common here in the UK and across Europe. It’s also fair to say they are more comfortable in colder temperatures than most… being resident in places from the Mediterranean to the Arctic… they are apparently even occasionally sighted on Siberia.
Like many bumblebees and solitary bees the males emerge first in the spring and curiously when they’re ready to mate head to a spot and produce a chemical to attract the queen to their location. The use of chemicals and pheromones to communicate is common among bees though the queen in an Early Bumblebee nest doesn’t use pheromones to keep order within the colony.
