We are lucky enough to have around 250 different types of bee – so get outside and see how many you can spot and do what you can to help these awesome little pollinators.

The tree bumblebee is chestnut brown at the front, black in the middle, with a white bottom. Unlike the others, it likes to nest in holes in trees, hence the name. Photo: Dave Goulson.

The garden bumblebee is like the white-tailed but with three yellow stripes and an enormously long tongue, half the length of its own body, that it uses to suck nectar from deep flowers that other bumblebees cannot reach. Photo: Dave Goulson.

The White-tailed Bumblebee is quite similar to the Buff-tailed, but as the name suggests, the tail is white, and the yellow stripes a paler, more lemony yellow. Once you have those two sorted it gets easier. Photo: Allan Hopkins via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND).

Earlier this year the International Union for Conservation of Nature [IUCN] warned that almost one in ten of Europe’s native wild #bees face extinction.