The Moss carder is a scarce, ginger-brown bumblebee which in Scotland is found mostly in the northwest Highlands and Islands. Its name stems from the old wool-combing verb ‘to card’, referring to the way in which the queens comb moss and grass into a thatch to make their nests.
The Outer Hebrides and Shetland have distinctive island colour forms, which typically have a dark ginger thorax and paler abdomen along with black undersides, head and legs. It is a long-tongued species that feeds on a range of flowers, particularly red clover, white clover and bird’s foot trefoil.
Moss carder bumblebees tend to prefer wet and exposed areas (an ideal Scottish species) and are found in flowery grasslands like machair and in flower-rich marshes and moorlands. Machair is a fragile coastal habitat found on the Atlantic coast of Scotland and on the islands of the Inner and Outer Hebrides, Orkney, and Shetland. Moorlands are complex, internationally important habitats that include heathlands and peatlands.
Photo: Dave Goulson
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 including marshland and wetland, well-managed moorlands and restoration of peatlands.
- Advocate for specific measures to protect machair habitat: greater financial support for low intensity, regenerative crofting practices that sustain it; reform of the current model of agricultural support which disadvantages crofters and small-scale farmers; and continued multi-year funding to manage greylag geese numbers.
- 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 Moss carder bumblebee is found.
- Promote the actions in our Bumblebee Manifesto.
Threats
- Habitat loss and fragmentation. The Moss carder bumblebee is particularly vulnerable to this as it has a small foraging range (within 500m) and low dispersal range, meaning it can’t fly further afield to find alternative sites. Isolated populations lead to a gradual decline in genetic viability.
- Climate change: the Moss carder’s machair, marsh and moorland habitats are extremely vulnerable to climate warming.
- Poor management of moorland – through over-burning, over- or under-grazing, trampling, and draining of peatlands – reduces the diversity of flowering plants in these fragile ecosystems and damages the soil structure.
- Machair is threatened by insufficient economic support for traditional crofting and grazing practices that sustain it, and by over-grazing by increasing numbers of greylag geese.
- Draining of marshland and wetland habitats for development or agriculture.
- 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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