Yellow-banded bumblebee
The yellow-banded bumblebee is a round, fuzzy bee dressed in black and yellowish-tan. It lives in a family with a queen, workers and boys. It is clever too: it can tell which flowers other bees have already emptied.
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Fun facts
It can warm up its own body so it can fly even when the weather is cold.
The queen is the biggest, about 18 millimetres long.
It can visit about 12 to 21 flowers in one minute.
It helps grow food by pollinating potatoes, raspberries, cranberries and alfalfa.
It used to be very common, but there are far fewer of them since the late 1990s.
Most asked questions about Yellow-banded bumblebee
?How big is a yellow-banded bumblebee?
Workers are about 9 to 14 millimetres long, and the queen is about 18 millimetres.
?Why is the yellow-banded bumblebee rare now?
Scientists think new buildings and roads and bee illnesses have made them fewer.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Bombus terricola
- Named by
- Kirby, 1837
- Group
- Bees and bumblebees
- Family
- Apidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Hymenoptera > Apidae
- Lives on
- North America
- Also known as
- Yellow-banded bumble bee
Where the facts come from
- Bombus terricola (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 Rob Foster. CC BY 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 [email protected] and we will fix it.
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