Help us track two of Ireland’s most endangered bumblebees

Interested volunteers can help us track the status of the Great yellow bumblebee and the Shrill carder bee and assist with their conservation. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In good news both the Great yellow bumblebee (left) and the Shrill carder bee (right) are being picked up on a small number of sites through the All-Ireland Bumblebee Monitoring Scheme. Long term monitoring of these species greatly helps in understanding how strong individual populations are. 

Can you help?

For Rare Species Watch we have chosen 5 locations for each species to focus on. These are locations where the species has been recorded post 1990, but has not been seen since 2010. For most of these locations we simply don’t know if the species still occurs there.

Rare Species Watch sites

Please help by visiting any of these locations between late June –early September on a good day and letting us know if the species is still there. If you visit and don’t find the species, please email to let me know: [email protected]

Submit bumblebee records on-line
Thank you for your help

 

The Great yellow bumblebee Bombus distinguendus is in severe decline in Ireland but we don’t have good data on it’s current distribution.

For more information on how to protect the Great Yellow Bumblebee click on this link

 

 

 

 

 

 

We know Bombus sylvarum has declined in Ireland but we don’t have a good handle on the current status of this species. The Burren currently represents the most important location for this species in Ireland and Britain.

Full information on the ecology of B. sylvarum, what habitats it likes, how to identify it, how to survey, and how to collect abundance data are available in this pdf: Information on conserving the Shrill carder bee 2015