Short-haired bumble bee
The short-haired bumble bee is a furry bumble bee from Europe and Asia. It has an amazing story. It disappeared from Britain, and people worked for years to bring it back, with help from bees from New Zealand and Sweden.
How fast is it?
Fun facts
Between 1885 and 1906, people took it from Britain to New Zealand to help pollinate red clover.
It was last seen in Britain in 1988 and then died out there.
In 2009 people tried to bring it back to Britain with queens from New Zealand, but many of the queens died during their winter sleep.
In 2012 they tried again with queens from southern Sweden. By the summer of 2013, new worker bees were buzzing near the place where the queens were let go.
In New Zealand it is the rarest of the four kinds of bumble bee that people brought there.
Most asked questions about Short-haired bumble bee
?Why did the short-haired bumble bee disappear from Britain?
Nobody knows for sure. Many scientists think the bees were too closely related to each other, which made them weaker.
?Did the short-haired bumble bee come back to Britain?
People brought queens from Sweden, and in 2013 new workers were found, so the bees had built nests.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Bombus subterraneus
- Group
- Bees and bumblebees
- Family
- Apidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Hymenoptera > Apidae
- Lives on
- Europe, Asia, Australia and Oceania
- Also known as
- Short-haired humble-bee
Where the facts come from
- Short-haired bumblebee (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 (c) CheongWeei Gan, some rights reserved (CC BY). CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons. The sticker of this bug is drawn from this 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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