Wool Carder Bee on cornflower
Anthidium manicatum
Wool Carder Bee · Brooklyn Botanic Garden · 26 July 2026
A Wool Carder Bee on a cornflower in the July border, a European species now well established in North America and one of the few bees where the male is larger and more aggressive than the female. Males patrol a patch of flowers and will ram or grapple with almost anything that intrudes, bees several times their own size included, to hold a territory worth mating over.
Black with bold yellow spots down the sides of the abdomen. The common name comes from the females, which shave soft fibres off fuzzy-leaved plants like lamb's ear to line their nests - "carding wool" in the old sense of combing it into usable fibre.
Birds, insects, plants and other wildlife, mostly from Brooklyn, with some from further afield.
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