The Walden Effect: Farming, simple living, permaculture, and invention.

Bumblebee Identification

Bumblebee on cloverOnce I learned that there are about 24 species of bumblebees in eastern North America, I wanted to know exactly which kind I had in my garden.  Identification seems like it should be pretty simple --- keys like this one break it down to a matter of color pattern.  Unfortunately, once I plugged in all of my choices, the key still said it didn't have enough data to decide between nine species.

A little more browsing narrowed down the choices.  Chances are my bees are the Common Eastern Bumblebee.  The species is pretty well named since it's the most common eastern bumblebee. :-)


This post is part of our Bumblebee lunchtime series.  Read all of the entries:





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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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