Delving into The Scotsman archives can be a pleasant way to spend an evening. You never know what you will stumble across, and it is often surprising how history appears to repeat itself. That proved the case when I typed ‘bumblebee’ into the search box. 

Bumblebee identification classes are very popular today, with good reason.  As I trawled the newspaper’s archives it was soon clear the challenge of correctly identifying bumblebees is nothing new. 

My search had carried me back almost 100 years ago. A regular running feature in the Saturday edition was ‘Nature Notes’. In July 1924 the author had asked, under a sub-heading ‘The Humble-Bee’, if any readers had noticed how few ‘humble-bees’ are to be seen this summer?

“At this time of year,” they went on to note, “the fields and highways are usually alive with the hum of what we call in Scotland ‘the bumble-bee, but this year ‘bumbees’ seem scarce. The long, cold spring, perhaps, explains the situation – many of the queens would succumb for want of food, blossom of all kinds being about a month later than usual. Whether this toll in the bumble-bee species will affect the fertilisation of plant life throughout the year is a question for experts. No insect contributes in greater proportion to the fertilisation of plants than ‘wild bees’.”

It’s an interesting snippet on many levels.  The use of the terms Humble-Bee, bumble-bee, and bumbee, in one short article is quite striking.

A few days later The Scotsman carried a response from Philipstoun near Linlithgow. The writer went on to confirm that they too had scarcely seen any ‘bumble-bees’ but mentioned that on the cotoneaster growing on the walls of their manse, were large numbers of ‘wild bees’ visiting the abundant small pink flowers.  

The description of the species was “being not so large as the well-known ‘bumble-bee’”.  It was apparently “black with a bright yellow band on the segment behind the head, and the hindquarters had a band of reddish tinge dominating the yellow, some of the bees had a yellow band on the ‘posterior segment’ of the body”. 

We will never be sure what the writer saw, but it seems likely from the description that they did indeed have bumble-bees (possibly the early bumblebee) but not the relatively common buff-tailed or white-tailed species.

It’s a subject that crops up at bumblebee conferences to this day – just how tricky it can be for non-specialists to be 100% sure of bumblebee identification. Some things it seems never change, and at our most recent conference it was seen as perhaps the biggest single challenge facing the citizen scientist who wishes to submit records and engage in monitoring. So much so that in some instances records are invited which are submitted merely as ‘general’ rather than ‘species specific’ bumblebee records.

Back to the archives, and five years later, in 1929, bumblebees were again capturing the imagination of The Scotsman readership.

“Humble-Bees or Bumble-Bees” was the title given to a letter from A Robertson in March 1929. They challenged an earlier correspondent who had stated that ‘there were three varieties of bumbees” in Scotland. Robertson went on to point out that ‘actually there are 17 species of Bumble-bee in the British Island, and of these bumblebees – known as bumbees in rural Scotland – more than half were found in Scotland.” However, conceded, “to the untutored in the lore of bumble-bee life history, many of the species will be indistinguishable from each other. The colour markings bear considerable resemblance to one another.” 

The carder bees were a point in case.

Picking out Bombus muscorum, they noted that the earlier article “referred to them as the ‘Foggie-toddler’ – the moss bee – so similar to B. agrorum (Bombus pascuorum today) – the field bee – that only experts can single these out. And so (too) in the case of the yellow and white banded bumblebees.” 

But wait, there is more.

One reader recalled that when out fishing as a boy the river banks had “fairly swarmed with wild bee’s bykes”. 

Today we more readily associate the word ‘bykes’ with wasps nests, but back then it was clear that the reader was spotting carder nests in grass mounds which the local gamekeeper called ‘riggins’. The writer apologetically stated that alas he ‘harried’ many of these nests. This appears to have been moss carder bumblebee nests, as the reader differentiates between ‘bumblebees’ nesting in holes in the ground, “whereas the wild bees’ nests were in the grass or moss tufts.”  

Old names, new names, different names – it matters little, it seems that identification has been a constant challenge.

Notes

You can access The Scotsman archive as a card holder at the National Library of Scotland. 

Today there are 24 resident species of bumblebee in Britain (see https://www.bumblebeeconservation.org/about-bumblebees/ 20 of which occur in Scotland. Since 1929, Bombus cullumanus and Bombus subterraneus (neither present in Scotland) have gone extinct, but the latter has been reintroduced, and we’ve recently gained Bombus hypnorum – which is spreading in Scotland.