The Great Yellow bumblebee is a very scarce, iconic species, once widespread throughout the UK but now extinct in England and Wales. It is found only in the Inner and Outer Hebrides, northwest Sutherland, Caithness and Orkney. It is easily identified by its golden yellow colouration with a distinct band of black hairs between the wings.
The Great Yellow is a specialist of open habitats such as extensive meadows and other types of species-rich grassland. It is closely associated with machair, a fragile coastal habitat unique to the northwest of Scotland and Ireland. Machair is found on the Atlantic coast of Scotland and on the islands of the Inner and Outer Hebrides, Orkney, and Shetland. Low-lying coastland with shell-based sands, strong winds, rainfall and salt spray combine with traditional low-intensity agricultural practices to form a unique, species-rich grassland, abundant in wildflowers and wildlife.
The Great Yellow is a late-emerging bumblebee and queens are usually seen from mid-June to September. They nest in old mouse nests, vole runs, rabbit burrows and other holes under grass tussocks. The Great Yellow has disappeared from around 80% of its former range in the last century, making it one of the UK’s rarest bumblebees.
Photo: © Bumblebee Conservation Trust
Action Needed
- Promote action to tackle climate change.
- Advocate for national and local policies, including advice and agri-environment schemes where appropriate, that create and protect well-connected, flower-abundant habitats, to restore viable populations and mitigate the effects of climate change.
- Advocate for greater financial support for low intensity, regenerative crofting practices that sustain the machair habitat, and for reform of the current model of agricultural support which disadvantages crofters and small-scale farmers.
- Support continued multi-year funding to manage greylag geese numbers in machair habitats.
- Advocate for evaluation of the 2017-27 Pollinator Strategy for Scotland and for a strengthened Pollinator Strategy from 2027, with monitoring and evaluation of progress towards each outcome.
- Promote our BeeWalk citizen science scheme, in which volunteers record essential data about bumblebee populations, particularly in the more remote areas where the Great Yellow bumblebee is found.
- Promote the actions in our Bumblebee Manifesto.
Threats
- Loss and fragmentation of species-rich grassland habitats, leading to a lack of foraging and nesting sites and splitting local populations into isolated smaller units. This isolation causes a gradual decline in genetic viability.
- Insufficient economic support for traditional crofting and grazing practices that sustain the machair habitat.
- Over-grazing of the machair by increasing numbers of greylag geese.
- Climate change: as a cold-adapted species, the predicted rises in temperature risk the Great Yellow being pushed further north and even disappearing from the UK altogether. Machair is also extremely vulnerable to climate change as a low-lying coastal habitat.
- As with all bumblebees, the use of pesticides/herbicides can have both lethal and sub-lethal effects on this species.
MSP Nature Champion
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