(Photo and story by Anita Fernandez)

Imagine this, you walk the loop around the Silk Farm Sanctuary pollinator meadow, seeing dozens of buzzing honeybees, carpenter bees, and bumblebees from small to large crawling, flying, and feeding. Suddenly, you see a bumblebee that looks just a little bit different. It has an orange butt! This bumblebee doesn’t move as quickly as other bees, instead taking its time at each flower. It is the Tricolored Bumble bee, sometimes called the Orange-Belted Bumble bee. There are many more reported sightings of this bee in northern New Hampshire than southern, but there have been a few this year around the McLane Center in Concord. This is a bee that emerges in late April and can sometimes be seen flying all the way into mid-autumn. It has two abdominal segments (the bulbous back part of its body) that are a rusty orange color all the way across. This species looks similar to the state-endangered Rusty Patch Bumble bee, which has only a small patch at the top center of its abdomen that is a rust color. A good place to search for a Tricolored Bumble bee is in the goldenrod flowers, which seems to be a preferred food source.