The snapdragons have been flowering for about a month now. I’ve been leaning in to get a whiff of their bubblegum / tutti frutti scent from time to time. And then I saw the weirdest bee. This was right after Readercon, so finding out what it was sort of got lost in the shuffle. And it was so scary looking, it took me a while to even want to look at it long enough to find out.
This is a Wool carder bee (Anthidium manicatum). Isn’t that creepy looking? I didn’t know a bee could scare me.
But now that I’ve looked it up, it’s such a cool bee! (Aren’t they all?) The males establish territories for the females to feed in, and the females gather fuzzy material from plants like Lamb’s Ear. I don’t have many fuzzy plants in my yard, so I can’t explain why a wool carder was climbing in and out of my snapdragons, unless it was trying to make a lame joke about being an Anthidium on Antirrhinum. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.)
Next year, maybe I’ll plant something for the wool carders, too.
Writing Every Day 