A crash course in South Central Bumble Bee ID
Publié leaoût 18, 2026parAnnika Wilcox|Les bourdons, Initiative pour les pollinisateurs indigènes, Actualités et événementsPhoto: T. Harrison.
Qu'est-ce que le Programme de rétablissement des bourdons? Depuis les années 1990, le nombre de bourdons a chuté de façon spectaculaire, ce qui représente un désastre écologique. Ici, à Conservation de la faune au Canada, nous travaillons à prévenir la disparition des espèces de bourdons en péril en les surveillant à l'état sauvage, en les élevant pour les relâcher dans notre laboratoire de conservation en Ontario, et en étudiant leurs excréments pour y trouver des parasites ! Nous organisons même des événements spéciaux de science citoyenne à travers la province pour suivre la taille des populations, localiser les populations en déclin et offrir des programmes de formation pratiques dans le but d'élargir nos efforts à travers le Canada. Nous sommes la seule organisation au pays à travailler à rétablir les populations de bourdons en péril grâce à l'élevage de conservation.
My gateway into wildlife conservation was through birds. Here in Ontario, learning our local birds is a pretty manageable task. There are dozens of excellent field guides, most birds are large enough to easily see their distinctive field marks, and I was lucky enough to have plenty of mentors who could answer my trickiest ID questions.
At the time though, while I was slowly learning to keep my sparrows straight, I had no idea of the identification nightmare awaiting me: bumble bees.
All things considered, bumble bees should be pretty straightforward. Here in south central Ontario, we only have about thirteen regularly encountered species, compared to a couple hundred birds. But the problem with bumble bees is that they’re tiny, and at first glance they all seem to look exactly the same. And, apparently bumble bee experts don’t grow on trees. When we go to outreach programs, we spend a good chunk of time telling people that there’s more than just one species of bumble bee!
I now find the WPC bumble bee ID cards incredibly useful, but before I started working for the program I remember staring at them wondering what, exactly, I was looking for. What makes a confusing bumble bee confusing? Where exactly are the two spots on a two-spotted bumble bee?
So alas, here is a collection of the quickest, and in my opinion, most useful field marks for each regularly occurring species here in south central Ontario. Think of it as a cheat sheet to use in combination with the WPC ID cards.
Before we begin: Brief anatomy lesson
There are only a few parts of a bee that you need to know:
A bees’ body consists of three parts: the head, the thorax, and the abdomen. The head is up front (obviously), followed by the thorax. This middle section is where the wings and the legs attach. The last section, or the bee’s ‘butt’, is the abdomen, which is split into six segments (or seven, in male bees), aka ‘terga’. I find that the pattern on these segments is the most useful thing to look for to determine what species you’ve got. The segments are numbered: T1 is the closest to the thorax, followed by T2, T3, and so on.
We also want to keep an eye out for what’s on the face, the hairs beneath the wing bases (which I will be affectionately referring to as their ‘wing pits’), and the shiny, hairless pollen basket (called a corbicula) on the hind legs of most female bumble bees.
If you know where those features are, then we’re ready to begin!
Quick disclaimer: these shortcuts, and the WPC Bumble Bee ID cards, are based on female bumble bees (workers and queens). Males often have different colour patterns and can be much more variable. If your bee doesn’t seem to match any of the descriptions below, try taking photos from several angles and uploading them to BumbleBeeWatch.org, where an expert will identify it for you.
The Black-bottomed Bees
Common eastern bumble bee (Bombus impatiens)
Common easterns live up to their name – they’re incredibly abundant here in south central Ontario, and are luckily an easy bee to ID. Their first abdominal segment (T1) is yellow, and all the rest are black! Photo par A. Wilcox.
Two-spotted bumble bee (Bombus bimaculatus)
The abdomen of a two-spotted bumble bee looks like a common easterns’, but will have a small patch of yellow in the centre of the second abdominal segment (T2). Sometimes it looks like two clear spots of yellow, forming a W shape, and other times they merge into a little blob. Photo : A. Wilcox.
Brown-belted bumble bee (Bombus griseocollis)
Instead of a small spot of yellow on T2, brown-belted bumble bees have a crescent of yellow or brown hair on T2 that extends all the way to the edges of the segment. Their hair is also very short, giving them the look of a bee with a buzzcut! Photo: C. Woo-Durand.
Confusing bumble bee (Bombus perplexus)
In my opinion, poorly-named! Confusing bumble bees are yellow on T1 and T2, with black underneath, and have no black hairs on their thorax at all. No matter what angle you look at its thorax from, it has solely golden-yellow hairs! Photo : A. Wilcox.
Half-black bumble bee (Bombus vagans)
These bees look very similar to confusing bumble bees, but do have a spot of black hairs on their thorax. They also have a very long, ‘horsey’ face, which helps differentiate this species from lookalike species like the Sanderson’s bumble bee and, sometimes, the red-belted bumble bee. Photo: T. Harrison.
The Orange-banded Bees
Red-belted bumble bee (Bombus rufocinctus)
This species is the trickster of bumble bees in Ontario – sometimes they are only yellow and black, but sometimes they have beautiful bands of red or orange! A good giveaway is a yellow crescent on T2, much like a brown-belted, that then blends into black or orange/red underneath. Red-belted bumble bees also often have an eye-shaped spot of black hairs on their thorax (we call it the ‘Eye of Sauron’). Photo : A. Wilcox.
Tri-coloured bumble bee (Bombus ternarius)
Perhaps Ontario’s most beautiful bee! Their abdomen features a striking sequence of colours:
T1: yellow
T2-T3: orange or red
T4: yellow
T5 onwards: black
Their thorax also has a distinctive thumbtack-shaped patch of black hairs. Photo : A. Wilcox.
The Yellow Bees
Yellow bumble bee (Bourdon ardent)
This bee lives up to its name – it is exceptionally yellow! It can be easily distinguished from its lookalike species, the northern amber bumble bee, by its black face and yellow wing pits. If its wing pits are yellow, you’re looking at a yellow bumble bee! Photo : A. Wilcox.
Northern amber bumble bee (Bombus borealis)
This species is the lookalike to the yellow bumble bee, and is also almost entirely yellow. However, a northern amber bumble bee has a yellow face and black wing pits. It also is a beautiful, deep yellow colour, as its name suggests. Photo: T. Harrison.
The Yellow-banded Bees
All three species in this category have the same basic abdomen pattern:
T1: black
T2-T3: yellow
T4 onwards: black
American bumble bee (ourdon de Pennsylvanie, m)
American bumble bees have black wings, a black face, and black hairs on the top of their head. The yellow band on their abdomen also frequently creeps up into T1, so their pattern is slightly modified into:
T1: half black, half yellow
T2-T3: yellow
T4 onwards: black
Photo : A. Wilcox.
Black-and-gold bumble bee (Bombus auricomus)
This bee looks nearly identical to the American bumble bee, but if you take a peek at the top of their heads, they have little yellow ‘eyebrows’! Just adorable. They also will not have yellow on the bottom half of T1 – the first segment should be entirely black. Photo : A. Wilcox.
Yellow-banded bumble bee (Bourdon terricola)
While this bee shares the same general abdomen pattern as the American and black-and-gold bumble bees, their wings are not nearly as dark as those species, and they also have a ‘skirt’ of yellow hairs on the bottom of T5. Pretty cute! Photo : A. Wilcox.
The Cuckoo Bee
A quick lesson in cuckoo bumble bee life history will help in understanding and identifying cuckoos: Cuckoo bumble bees have evolved a very different lifestyle from other bumble bees. Instead of founding their own colonies and collecting pollen, a female cuckoo invades the nest of another species, kills or ousts the resident queen, and uses her workers to raise the cuckoo’s offspring. Since cuckoo females don’t collect pollen themselves, they’ve lost the shiny pollen basket (corbicula) found on the hind legs of other female bumble bees.
Lemon cuckoo bumble bee (Bombus citrinus)
The most common cuckoo bumble bee species in this part of the province is the lemon cuckoo, which has a plain yellow thorax (without a black spot), and a highly variable abdomen. As a cuckoo, it also lacks a corbicula. Some individuals have an entirely black abdomen, while others have a yellow band about halfway down, and others have the first few abdominal segments yellow and the bottom few black. Perhaps this should be called the confusing bumble bee! Photo : A. Wilcox.
Not sure? Ask your friendly neighbourhood bumble bee expert!
While this guide is (hopefully) quite useful when combined with the ID cards, you will almost certainly encounter bees that don’t seem to line up with anything you’ve learned – I’ve looked at thousands of bumble bees over the past couple years, and I still see strange bees sometimes! A great way to have a pro weigh in on your bumble bee ID is to upload photos to BumbleBeeWatch.org, a platform that collects and verifies bumble bee observations across Canada and the United States. The data collected has been used by conservation biologists to assess how bee populations are doing, and what species might be in need of some extra help – in fact, data from Bumble Bee Watch directly helped get the American bumble bee listed as a species at risk!
When an observation is uploaded, a team of experts will go through your images and offer an identification. It’s a tool I used even before I began doing bumble bee monitoring for work, and was phenomenal for helping me hone my ID skills.
Get bumbling!
Learning your local bumble bees can feel overwhelming at first – trust me, I’m speaking from personal experience when I say that. But like everything, the more you practice it, the easier it’ll become. At this point, I normally know what species I’ve got before I even take it out of the net.
This quick crash course won’t be useful for every bee you find, as I am convinced that bumble bees actually love proving me wrong, but it’ll help you narrow down your options. So if you’re ready for the challenge, go find a beautiful patch of flowers near you, take lots of photos, and get uploading to Bumble Bee Watch. Looking forward to seeing you there!
Annika Wilcox
Coordinatrice des programmes de l'Ontario – Initiative pour les pollinisateurs indigènes
Annika a rejoint l'équipe de CFC de la Pie-grièche migratrice en tant que biologiste en recherche en 2025 avant de passer à l'Initiative pour les pollinisateurs indigènes en tant que coordonnatrice des programmes en Ontario. Elle possède une vaste expérience en sensibilisation environnementale, réhabilitation de la faune, et surveillance écologique des oiseaux, des amphibiens, des reptiles et des insectes à risque. Annika est titulaire d'une maîtrise en biologie intégrative de l'Université de Guelph, où elle a mené des recherches sur les facteurs limitants des zones humides agricoles restaurées comme habitat de reproduction pour les oiseaux, en mettant l'accent sur les espèces en péril.
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