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Sticker of Yellow-banded bumblebee
Bug card No. 4884 of 4,939

Yellow-banded bumblebee

Bombus terricola
Eats: Nectar and pollenBees and bumblebeesGardens and meadows6 legs

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.

Lives in
Southern Canada and the eastern and midwestern United States
Length
0.9 to 1.7 cm (0.35 to 0.67 in)
Top speed
about 16 km/h (9.9 mph)
Flying, estimate
Can it hurt you?
Can sting

Watch out! Read about its close cousin on Venom Wiki →

What does it eat?
It drinks nectar and collects pollen from flowers, and feeds them to the babies in the nest.
For real!Photo of Yellow-banded bumblebee
Picture by Rob Foster. CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

How big is it?

How long is it?

Yellow-banded bumblebee about 1.7 cm long (0.67 in)A grain of rice about 6 mm (0.24 in)A toy building brick about 3.2 cm (1.3 in)A crayon about 9 cm (3.5 in)
as long as 3 grains of rice in a rowcould fly across a whole football pitch in 24 secondsmoves 260 times its own body length every second

How big is Yellow-banded bumblebee compared to YOU?

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How fast is it?

cool stuff

Fun facts

1

It can warm up its own body so it can fly even when the weather is cold.

2

The queen is the biggest, about 18 millimetres long.

3

It can visit about 12 to 21 flowers in one minute.

4

It helps grow food by pollinating potatoes, raspberries, cranberries and alfalfa.

5

It used to be very common, but there are far fewer of them since the late 1990s.

you asked

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

  1. 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.
  2. Picture by Rob Foster. 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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