The Elephant Bee

We are busy as bees here at BirdGuides... filming bees and dragonflies. You will not be surprised to hear that a guide to British Bumblebees is in the works. We are producing it with our partners at the Bumblebee Conservation Trust and Habitat Aid. The title will include a stunning set of illustrations by Richard Lewington.

We have also nearly completed an app that will help birders discover the wonderful world of dragonflies. This project is a partnership with WildGuides, who produce excellent photographic field guides. Over the past couple of days we have been running around Scotland failing (yet again) to film the elusive Azure Hawker. It is still early in the season, so watch this space.

The trip was not a total fiasco. We did manage to acquire some useful footage of this fine creature:

This Bombus hortorum (you can tell because it has a yellow band both above and below its waist). It is about to perform one of the clever tricks it is famous for... drinking nectar from foxgloves. And after chasing this particular bee around the shores of Loch Maree, it settled for a moment hanging upside down beneath a flower and showed me how it manages to reach the deeply hidden sugary treat. B. hortorum has an incredibly long forked tongue. It is about as long as our arms relative to our bodies. And about as long, in proportion, as an elephant's trunk.