Non-honey bees

I’m busy identifying bees collected during my recent field trip. I just found a male Bombus semenoviellus among them. It’s an interesting species – one of a few European species colonizing recently new areas, and at the same time being at the highest risk of suffering under climate change in the future. Do these two things contradict each other? Not really. In the future, B. semenoviellus will be losing the climatically suitable areas faster than gaining it in other places.

If you feel too optimistic today, feel free to check out the atlas of climatic risk for European bumblebees. Spoiler: climate change is very bad news for most of them.

Mimicry is a phenomenon in which one species becomes, in the course of evolution, similar to another. One of the classical examples are bumblebee-mimic or wasp-mimic hoverflies. But how do we know that a hoverfly mimics a bee or wasp, and not the other way around?

The type of mimicry we see in hoverflies evolved to give protection against predators. The distinctive appearance says: don’t eat me, I can hurt you. The weapon of bees and wasps is their stinger. Hoverflies are harmless, and they get protection from being confused with stinging insects by predators. Therefore, bees and wasps are models, and hoverflies are mimics, not the other way around.

This post was created in collaboration with The Pollinator Academy, a great resource of knowledge about taxonomy of European bees, hoverflies and butterflies.