Insect and Spider Identification: CLOSED: Large black and white bumble bee.., 1 by wallaby1

wallaby1 wrote:
The long shaggy hairs almost had me fooled too, the 2nd to last one on the back of the dahlia has very strong colouring so must be a new specimen. It has no other yellow stripes (other than the short ones) though as the male B. bohemicus has, and the female doesn't have the short strips above the white tail so that sort of rules it out.

There is a male B. vestalis like the one on the dahlia though, also a queen but this was a little smaller than the queen/female in the April pic, but could be either. The queen has a white tail tip i nB. vestalis, it does look to have that in other pics I got but the tail tip can't be seen well.

Another of the bee on the dahlia, it flew to a clematis, in fact it didn't stay still at all! One thing I have noticed with the cuckoo bees now is they stay for a long time on the same flower, they seem to be very slow. When I see a larger one of the same type they move more quickly, so maybe the queens need to be fast moving to survive and reproduce.

The yellow above the white can be seen more clearly.