April — Bombus vosnesenskii
Black, with a yellow face, a yellow band on the thorax and another near the end of the abdomen.
The flower is camas, and it is the reason this is April. Camas blooms across the Willamette Valley in April and May, and the bulbs were a staple food here for thousands of years — the prairies they grew in were tended deliberately, with fire, to keep them open. There is a camas meadow at Oaks Bottom, inside the city, and this is a native bee working a native flower in the month it actually happens.
Look at the orange lumps on her back legs. Those are pollen baskets and they are full. She is not sampling this meadow, she is provisioning a nest.
Photographed in the meadow at Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge by Jonathan Swanson.
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