The garden is full of all kinds of bees - bumble bees, honey bees, and very large mostly black bees...

This little guy landed right in front of me as if to pose for the camera...

I've got two of these little critters hanging out on the butterfly weed. They are quite fat and happy.

And a few butterflies:
She rested on this redbud tree after laying lots of eggs on dill.

I have not seen a bumblebee since the '90s. They are having major problems.

~Laura

If I may ask KC, what's this? I always thought it was a bumblebee? S/he wasn't the object of the photo, the blooms of the buttonbush were, and s/he happened to fly in as I was ready to take the picture.

The most widespread bumble bee is the yellow bumble bee which has an abdomen which is mostly yellow with a black band at the end.

The American bumble bee has a wide yellow band on its abdomen with black bands at the top and bottom of the abdomen.

The eastern carpenter bee is the bee most people call a bumblebee but is not. Its abdomen is completely black and it has a black spot in the middle of its thorax.

The giant resin bee is a bee that got here from east Asia and is found all over the eastern US. It looks a lot like an eastern carpenter bee but is a little skinnier and it sorta has a dark orange thorax hump surrounded by yellow.

Out west you have Centris bees that look like eastern carpenter bees without the black dot on the thorax.

Bumble bees are the US's only native social bee (queen and workers).

There are various insects which mimic bumble bees. The bumble bee moth is the forum favorite, I'm assuming. A couple flies are the most convincing mimics, like Laphria thoracica.

KC

Then I have this kind:

And this kind which I believe is the one in the very first picture above as well:

And then of course the honey bee:

All of these were taken this evening in about a five minute span!

~Laura

The article I linked mentioned 96% population drop and 87% less geographic coverage. The chance of you seeing a bumble bee these days is very slim except for certain pockets of the country.

Common Eastern Bumble Bee:
http://bugguide.net/node/view/56797

Eastern Carpenter Bee:
http://bugguide.net/node/view/3509

A listing of all their bumble bee pages is here:
http://bugguide.net/node/view/3077

I mentioned the yellow bumble bee earlier. Bug Guide refers to it as the golden northern bumble bee. Binomial name is Bombus fervidus.

On Laura's first pic from July 30th:
This is the only one I'm not sure about. Carpenter bees can have very "furry" thoraxes. From some angles, it can appear that the yellow thorax hair is coming from the top of the abdomen when it is not. Any chance you can crop the pic and post a higher resolution version of the just the bee? Photobucket reduces the resolution when you upload, so if you start with a cropped version, the Photobucket version of that should have more detail of the bee.

~Laura

~Laura

The full study can be seen here:
http://www.pnas.org/content/108/2/662.full

They studied 4 bumblebees that were thought to be in decline:
B. occidentalis
B. pensylvanicus
B. affinis
B. terricola

And they studied 4 bumblebees that were thought to have stable populations:
B. vosnesenskii
B. bifarius
B. bimaculatus.
B. impatiens

So the four species that did not show declines were not expected to show declines.

Another research paper:
Decline and Conservation of Bumble Bees
by D. Goulson, G.C. Lye, and B. Darvill

Annual Review of Entomology. 2008. 53:191-208

Article mentions the same four declining bumbles above but also adds:
B. franklini
B. sonorus
B. ashtoni

Another research paper:
Decline of bumble bees (Bombus) in the North American Midwest
by Jennifer C. Grixtia, Lisa T. Wonga, Sydney A. Cameronb,and Colin Favreta

Biological Conservation. Volume 142, Issue 1, January 2009, Pages 75-84

This study looked at bumble bees in Illinois. Historically, there were 16 different bumble bee species in Illinois. The study found that four were now gone. Four other species were still there but their range had decreased.

I could not find any studies on Oklahoma bumble bees.

Based on the fact that I have not seen a bumble bee in years, plus the attention grabbing headlines of news articles, I really thought the chance of you seeing a bumble bee was about zip. But after spending a few hours reading research on the subject, I now know that North American bumble bees still exist. You just have to live where the stable bumble bee populations live. Unfortunately, I do not live in one of those areas.

Having said that, you still need some yellow on the abdomen for it to be a bumble bee.

Evidence for decline in eastern North American bumblebees(Hymenoptera: Apidae), with special focus on Bombus affinis Cresson
by Sheila R Colla and Laurence Packer

Biodiversity and Conservation, Volume 17, Issue 6 (June 2008), p. 1379-1391
DOI: 10.1007/s10531-008-9340-5

Abstract:
Bumblebees (Bombus spp.) have been declining rapidly in many temperate regions of the Old World. Despite their ecological and economic importance as pollinators, North American bumblebees have not been extensively surveyed and their conservation status is largely unknown. In this study, two approaches were used to determine whether bumblebees in that region were in decline spatially and temporally. First, surveys performed in 2004-2006 in southern Ontario were compared to surveys from 1971 to 1973 in the same sites to look at changes in community composition, in one of the most bumblebee diverse areas of eastern North America. Second, the extent of range decline for a focal species (Bombus affinis Cresson) was estimated by surveying 43 sites throughout its known native range in eastern Canada and the United States. Our study documents an impoverishment of the bumblebee community in southern Ontario over the past 35 years. Bombus affinis in particular was found to have declined drastically in abundance not only in southern Ontario but throughout its native range. The loss of any bumblebee species may result in cascading impacts on native fauna and flora and reduce agricultural production. Implications for the conservation of this important group of pollinators are discussed.