In Harvard Square from 1:30 to 1:40, I saw two bumblebees flying around. One of them flew around a nearby tree and landed a few times on both the trunk and the leaves (right). The other bee flew over my shoulder and onto my book, where it stayed for about 15 seconds. It had a furry yellow section on its back with a black oval shape in the middle, and then one yellow and two more black stripes down its abdomen. It had two beady black eyes in the front of its head, relatively small compared its body, and two small antennae between them. It also had six legs with the front four being about the same size and the back two being a bit thicker. Because of how close up I was able to take the picture from, it gave me a clear view of its claws, or the ends of each leg that seemed to split into two. Its wings took up a bit over a third of its body and were clear, shiny, and tinted a warm shade of brown.

By collecting all of this information, I learned that there are many different types of bumblebees that you can generally tell apart from the patterns on their backs. I also learned that the weather plays a factor on how many bees are outside, specifically that windy, cloudy, and rainy weather leads to less bees. I've also never noticed before that many of the bees in our area have black circles on their bodies as we usually just imagine them with stripes, or noticed that they have tiny claws on the bottoms of their legs. In the future, my project and the data I've collected can help organizations like Bumble Bee Watch track different bumblebee populations and help conserve the endangered ones. It will also help track the behaviors of bumblebees in different places at different times to help us get a better understanding of these insects.