Okay so this little beauty, flew into the garden this morning. I knew I had seen these before but had not been able to get a proper ID. They are not in my insect books. So I tried on-line, and there in lies an interesting story.
This is a Tree Bumblebee (Bombus hypnorum), widely distributed across Europe and Asia, as far north as the Arctic Circle. However it had never been seen in Britain till it was found in Wiltshire in 2001. Since then it has spread out to cover almost the whole country, reaching southern Scotland in 2013.
