A bumblebee is covered in it, thick and soft, in stripes of yellow and black with a tail that can be white, buff, ginger or red depending on which species you've found. They're chunky too. The big queens you spot in March have just come out of hibernation and they're in no hurry, so you can usually watch one for a good while as she lumbers round the crocuses.
Honey bees look almost bald next to that. They've got a light fuzz on the thorax and that's about it, so the golden brown body and darker bands show through clearly. Plenty of people take them for wasps. The giveaway is the way they fly, straight from flower to flower with very little wandering, because every trip is about getting food back to the hive.
Life in the colony
A honey bee colony is a year-round operation. Our hives hold tens of thousands of bees at the height of summer, and they all answer to one queen who can carry on laying for several years. Her summer workers don't get long though. Six weeks or so of flat-out foraging and they're done. Once it gets cold the bees pull together into a ball in the middle of the hive, shiver to keep the queen warm and work their way through the honey they've saved.
Bumblebees don't plan that far ahead. A nest might reach a few hundred bees by midsummer if it's doing well, and then it's over. The old queen dies in autumn along with her workers. Only the new queens make it, each one burrowing into soil or under a bank to sleep through winter by herself before starting from scratch in spring.
Honey and where they nest
It's that long life that turns honey bees into honey makers, since a colony that has to survive January needs a serious store of food and they pack wax comb with far more than they'd ever get through in one summer. That spare honey goes into our whisky, rum, vodka and tequila, all of which you'll find in our gift bundles.
Bumblebees make only a few small wax pots of nectar to see the nest through a run of bad weather. They nest in old mouse holes, under sheds, in compost heaps and sometimes in empty bird boxes. You're unlikely to ever see a bumblebee nest unless you disturb one by accident.
Different ways of working the flowers
Bumblebees can fly in cooler and duller weather than honey bees because they warm themselves up by shivering their flight muscles. That means they're often out first thing in the morning and later into the evening. They're also experts at buzz pollination.
Honey bees are much more of a group effort, and when a forager finds a good patch of flowers she heads home and does the famous waggle dance on the comb to tell her sisters which direction to fly and how far to go. That's a big part of the reason they cope so well with huge crops like oilseed rape or clover, where a whole hive can end up working the same field.
Which one is more likely to sting?
A honey bee's sting is barbed, so when she uses it on a person it gets stuck in the skin and she dies, which is why you'll rarely be stung by one unless you're standing right beside the hive. Bumblebees have a smooth sting and could in theory sting more than once. In practice they're remarkably gentle and will usually fly off long before it comes to that. Male bees of either kind can't sting at all.
What you'll see in autumn and winter
On mild sunny days they'll still come out to forage on late ivy flowers, which gives them some of the last fresh nectar of the year. Most bumblebee queens are already tucked away for winter. In parts of southern England the buff-tailed bumblebee has started keeping colonies going right through the colder months by feeding on winter-flowering garden plants.
If you'd like to get closer to honey bees our beekeeping courses at the Wiltshire apiary are open to complete beginners.
