Yellow-faced Bumble Bee

Photo of a female Yellow-faced Bumble Bee collecting nectar or pollen from pink Verbena de la MIna flowers. The hairs on the bee's face and scutum are yellow. The rest of its body is covered by black hairs except for a band of yellow hair near the end of the abdomen.
Photo of a female Yellow-faced Bumble Bee collecting nectar or pollen from pink Verbena de la MIna flowers. The hairs on the bee's face and scutum are yellow. The rest of its body is covered by black hairs except for a band of yellow hair near the end of the abdomen.
Photo of a female Yellow-faced Bumble Bee collecting nectar or pollen visiting a clump of Pacific Asters. The hairs on the bee's face and scutum are yellow. The rest of its body is covered by black hairs except for a band of yellow hair near the end of the abdomen.

The Yellow-faced bumble bee,1 Bombus vosnesenskii, is common in coastal southern California. The bumble bee featured in the first two photographs might have been a recently emerged queen based upon her large size and the date. I photographed her on March 25, and again on April 3, 2024. On those dates she visited a large Verbena de la Mina shrub that was in full bloom in my backyard. ‘De la Mina’ is a cultivar of Verbena lilacina, a perennial native to the Baja, Mexico on the mainland and on Cedros Island.

Female workers visited a variety of plants around my house throughout the summer. It seemed to me that there was a nest site nearby. One day I observed a couple bumble bees entering and exiting an opening in the ground just beneath where a tree stump was disintegrating. The location was a mostly bare, dirt slope on one side of my house. Because the Yellow-faced group had been the most frequent bumble bee visitors over the summer, I suspected it was a nest site for that species, but did not try to investigate further. I was happy enough that a queen may have found an adequate location to nest on my property.

On August 7, 2024 I photographed another female (third photo) visiting a bed of Pacific Asters that had started to bloom in the front yard. My photos of her do not show her collecting pollen or nectar. I think she was clinging to a stem or leaf or two, taking a brief pause.

I started seeing male Yellow-faced bumble bees feeding at my front yard pollinator garden during the last week of August. They favored the blossoms of Salvia ‘Pozo Blue’2, a purple sage cultivar located on a southwestern facing slope in our front yard, but they visited other flowers as well. Bumble bees are generalists.

The male in the photographs below was feeding on nectar from a Pacific Aster cultivar known as ‘Purple Haze’.3 Male bumble bees have longer bodies with seven segments or terga that comprise the abdomen. Females have six terga. The male of this species has yellow hairs on two terga versus the female’s one yellow abdominal segment or tergum.

Photo of a male Yellow-faced bumble bee feeding on a Pacific Aster, a composite flower with yellow florets in the center surrounded by purple petals or rays.
Photo of a male Yellow-faced bumble bee feeding on a Pacific Aster, a composite flower with yellow florets in the center surrounded by purple petals or rays.
Photo of a male Yellow-faced bumble bee feeding on a Pacific Aster, a composite flower with yellow florets in the center surrounded by purple petals or rays.
  1. Bombus vosnesenskii, Bumble Bees of the Western United States. USDA Forest Service and the Pollinator Partnership. Xerces website page accessed on January 14, 2025, (PDF pp. 74-77). ↩︎
  2. Salvia ‘Pozo Blue’, Grey Musk Sage. Las Pilitas Nursery. Website page accessed January 15, 2025. ↩︎
  3. Purple Haze Coast Aster, Symphyotrichum chilense ‘Purple Haze’. Calscape, California Native Plant Society. Website page accessed on January 15, 2025. ↩︎

By S. Felton

S. Felton is a writer, photographer and amateur naturalist.

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