UK Bee Species

Bronze Furrow Bee (Halictus tumulorum)

Halictus tumulorum (Linnaeus, 1758) · subgenus Seladonia · family Halictidae

A small green bee of the mounds

The bronze furrow bee was described by Carl Linnaeus in 1758 in the founding work of zoological naming.^[3] Its species name, tumulorum, is Latin for "of the mounds", a fitting name for a bee that digs its burrow into low earth banks and gently raised patches of bare, sunlit soil.^[3] It sits in the subgenus Seladonia, a group of small, brightly metallic sweat bees; some modern authors treat Seladonia as a full genus, but here we follow the traditional placement in Halictus.^[5] At only five to seven millimetres long it is a good deal smaller than most bees people notice in the garden, which is why it so often gets missed.^[5][6]

Halictus or Lasioglossum? A tiny giveaway

The bronze furrow bee is the first member of the genus Halictus to be profiled here, and gives us a chance to explain the neatest trick for telling the two big sweat-bee genera apart. Both Halictus and Lasioglossum carry pale bands of felt-like hair across the abdomen, but the position of those bands is opposite between the two.^[8] On a Halictus such as this one, the bands sit on the back (apical) edge of each abdominal segment; on a Lasioglossum, on the front (basal) edge of the following segment.^[8] Look at a photo of the abdomen straight from above: the shining edges of the segments interrupt the pale bands in Lasioglossum, while Halictus bands sit right on those edges.^[8]

Sweat bees and furrow bees

The bronze furrow bee belongs to the Halictidae, the family known worldwide as sweat bees because some of its members are drawn to the salt in perspiration and will land harmlessly on skin to lap at it.^[7] In Britain the family goes by the tidier name furrow bee, after a fine hairless groove, the rima, on the female's last abdominal segment.^[7] You can see where the Halictidae sit alongside the other bee families in the World Bee Atlas.

A small social bee

Like many sweat bees, the bronze furrow bee is primitively eusocial: an overwintered female founds a nest in spring and raises a first brood, and some of those daughters stay on as workers to help rear a second brood of males and next-year females.^[4] Its colonies are on the smaller side, and unusually the foundress and workers are not sharply different in size, an oddity called weak polyphenism that first drew researchers to the species half a century ago.^[4] Females can be on the wing from April; workers appear by early summer, and males and new females fly late into the year, with records into October in warm years.^[1]

Where and when you will see it

The bronze furrow bee is a genuine generalist, taking pollen and nectar from a very wide range of flowers, with a documented spring preference for the catkins of sallows and later visits to umbellifers, brambles and daisies of every kind.^[5] It nests in short, sunlit turf and bare ground, often in small groups, and turns up in gardens, parks, brownfield, coastal cliffs and open country alike.^[1] It is widespread and common through southern Britain, becoming scarcer as one moves north into the Central Highlands of Scotland, and is also present on the Isles of Scilly and the Channel Islands.^[1] Its parasites are members of the blood-bee genus Sphecodes, small red-and-black cleptoparasites that enter unguarded nests to lay their own eggs in the host's cells.^[7]

How to tell it apart

The one bee that reliably fools the eye is the closely related and much rarer Halictus confusus, a heathland species confined to a handful of sites in southern England.^[1] Females of the two are so alike that identification is often only certain by dissecting a male and examining the genitalia.^[1] The best field clue is the pale hair band on the third abdominal segment of the female: in the bronze furrow bee it does not fill the whole apical depression and is noticeably narrower in the middle than at the sides, whereas in H. confusus it fills the depression fully and is even in width across.^[2] Males of the bronze furrow bee usually have dark middle and hind trochanters, while H. confusus males have them largely yellow.^[2] Outside its rare relative's range, a small metallic-green Halictus is almost always this species.^[2]

Why the bronze furrow bee matters

Because it is so widespread, active for so much of the year and so unfussy about the flowers it visits, the bronze furrow bee is one of the quiet background pollinators of gardens, parks and open flowery country across much of the Palaearctic.^[5] It is also a model for understanding how bee societies work: as a primitively eusocial species with weak worker/foundress differences, it sits close to the crossover between solitary and social living, and its behaviour has been studied in detail as part of that story.^[4] Recent work has produced a chromosome-level genome sequence for the species, which will feed further research into the origins of social behaviour in bees.^[5]

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Dragos Nistor

Founder, HoneyBee & Co. · Guest Lecturer, University of Greenwich

HoneyBee & Co. draws on six generations of family beekeeping heritage, with honey from the Nistor family apiaries and from carefully chosen British producers. Our British honey supplier holds SALSA Certification, and we offer a 15% NHS Discount. Every jar is raw, unfiltered and traceable to the hive.