Bumble bee identification poster

This is a poster of the bumble bees of Arkansas in PDF form that you can download and print. It is only valid for females, and only the typical ones of those, but it should get you started on identifying Bombus in Arkansas.

Changing distributions?

Bumble bee distributions may be changing in Arkansas. The maps at the left show the county-level distributions of all eight species of Bombus reported in AR. The solid colors show occurrences as reported in Chandler & McCoy's 1965 paper; the polka dots show records in the state since 2000. Whether the differences are attributable to real changes in distributions of these species or to differences in sampling remains to be seen. The red areas in the lower right show counties that have no records for bumble bees at all! If you'd like to help expand the records by sampling in these counties, drop me a line.