Bumblebees in images

Images   - Italian bumblebees - Bumblebees of   North America Faunistic notes   - Bumblebees   "Agri Ticinensis" - Bumblebees of the   upper Brembo valley - Bumblebees of the   Val Malenco Useful links   - bombus.it - Bombus - Atlas Hymenoptera - BumbleKey This is a collection of short videos and still images - taken from the videos - of bumblebees. Almost all the specimens illustrated in these pages are from the Lombardy region of northern Italy. The majority of these come from a rather restricted area in the Orobic Alps north of Bergamo; others come from the immediate surroundings of Pavia and from the Apennines just south of Pavia. About the videos. The videos have been shot with a small hand-held digital camcorder, under natural conditions, as our goal is to give an idea of what the bees look like and how they behave in nature. In particular, no artificial lighting has been used. While the still images are shown here at full resolution, the videos are presented at reduced resolution, in Mpeg-4 format. Viewing the videos. There are a number of players which can display the videos, such as for instance VLC or QuickTime Player. You can either download the videos and play them with one of these applications or, better still, instruct your browser to handle the videos (MIME type video/mp4, extension .mp4) with the appropriate application or plugin. Taxonomy. We generally adopt the names and scopes of taxa given in Paul Williams' checklist of world bumblebees (Williams, P. H. 1998. An annotated checklist of bumble bees with an analysis of patterns of description (Hymenoptera: Apidae, Bombini). Bulletin of The Natural History Museum (Entomology) 67: 79-152) and in its online version. However, we depart from the checklist in recognizing Bombus cryptarum as a valid species.