Early Spring is a great time of year to pay a little attention to some of the small but vitally important creatures that live all around us, but that we often take for granted – our bumblebees. 

At this time of year the queen bumblebees have just come out of hibernation – huge, furry zeppelins of the insect world. If you have some bee-friendly flowers in your garden you will see them hungrily feeding, for they haven’t had a meal for 7 months or more.

Once they are replete, you’ll see them flying low to the ground – they are hoping to find a hole that leads down to a cosy abandoned mouse nest, their favourite place to build their own nest.

Bumblebees are wild creatures, cousins of the smaller, more drab honeybees that we keep in hives. Take a moment to watch them, and you will soon see that there are different types – we have 26 species in the UK, and you can easily see seven different ones in any garden or park. Learn these seven, and you can amaze and amuse (or annoy) your friends by pointing out the different types.

Most common is the buff-tailed bumblebee, one of the biggest, with two golden yellow stripes and a brownish tail.

The white-tailed bumblebee is quite similar, but as the name suggests, the tail is white, and the yellow stripes a paler, more lemony yellow.

Once you have those two sorted, it gets easier – look out for the garden bumblebee, like the white-tailed but with three yellow stripes, and an enormously long tongue - half the length of its own body - that it uses to suck nectar from deep flowers that other bumblebees cannot reach.

The red-tailed bumblebee is a piece of cake – velvety black with a bright red bottom.

Then there is the common carder bumblebee - a drab gingery brown all over.

The early bumblebee is a sweet little bumblebee, smaller than the others, with two yellow stripes and a rusty red bottom.

And finally, the tree bumblebee, chestnut brown at the front, black in the middle, with a white bottom. Unlike the others, it likes to nest in holes in trees, hence the name.

This might all sound a bit confusing, but take your time. There is no rush. The bees will be with us now until the end of summer. Move slowly, and you will find that you can get very close to them – they are very docile, and will never sting so long as you don’t grab them in your hand.

If you have a garden, plant some bee friendly flowers, and you’ll soon see many more bees arrive (you can find information of the best flowers in my book Gardening for Bumblebees or on YouTube. If you really get hooked on beewatching, there are national recording schemes you can join – check out the webpages of the Bumblebee Conservation Trust for details.  

Dave Goulson is Professor of Biology at the University of Sussex. If you’d like to find out more about the wonderful world of the bumblebee, try reading his books A Sting in the Tale and A Buzz in the Meadow.