www.ukbutterflies.co.uk

Hi all,

BirdGuides kindly gave me a copy of their new bumblebees app (published in partnership with the Bumblebee Conservation Trust), and I've had a lot of fun playing with it and, I have to say, learned quite a bit given that I'm intensely focus on butterflies (and am seriously considering getting a T-shirt with "Rhopalocera Rock" on it ).

The app is up to the usual high standard, includes various charts (including comparison charts), detailed illustrations from Richard Lewington, detailed information, photos and, best of all, video footage. Quite a nice little package for anyone even remotely interested in identifying what they're seeing out in the field. The current version works on the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch - iOS6 required).

Here are direct links to both versions of the app on iTunes:

Pro Edition (all 23 species)
https://itunes.apple.com/app/bumblebees ... 77156?mt=8

Basic Edition (commonest 8 species)
https://itunes.apple.com/app/bumblebees ... 76684?mt=8

Cheers,

- Pete

for those of us on Android there is a free app for Irish bumblebees (18 species) - I imagine that most if not all also occur in the UK.
There is also a similar Irish butterflies app from the same author & both allow for direct reporting of sightings to records centre.

Having paid £9.99 for the pro version I have to agree with Pete in that it is a very useful App, although Bumblebees are surprisingly tricky to identify in some cases and dissections can be required which I refuse to perform. The downside is that unless you have a magnifying glass the writing on the introdction diagrams is impossible to read and in general anyone with poor eyesight will struggle with this App as the written sections are formatted so as the size of the page cannot be increased. A possible improvement for an update.

In general though an excellent field tool for someone such as myself who is just starting to look at Bumblebees.