A very smart-looking bee when freshly emerged, with bright foxy hairs on the thorax and a shining black abdomen with thin lines of white hairs on the apices of the segments. The males rapidly become very faded. A good character to separate the females is the form of the hind tibia which is widest at the apex, unlike the rest of the bees with this general appearance. When I first became interested in the aculeates in the 1970s this was a fairly scarce bee, but since then it has become one of the commonest andrenid bees, at least in the southern half of England.