European Wool Carder bees build solitary nests in pre-existing cavities such as cracks in buildings and holes bored in wooden structures. Females line their nests with plant hairs "carded" or scraped from garden plants such as lamb's ears, mullein and globe thistles.  They provision their nests with pollen and nectar collected from plants in the mint family.

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Males of this species are territorial and can be spied fighting off larger pollinators such as bumble bees and carpenter bees.  Male carder bees have a habit of hovering over flowers in midflight.  They tend to patrol a small patch of garden or a single flowering plant, policing it for the presence of other bees. When an intruder bee enters a carder bee's territory to feed on a flower, the carder bee will ram the intruder like a minature rhinoceros to knock it off the flower. 

 

Carder bees forage on a fairly wide variety of plants, including mullein, mints, butterfly bush, goldenrod, viper's bugloss and the flowers of melons and squash.  They are useful pollinators of peas and beans and of commercially grown flowers such as snapdragons.
 

Carder bees appear in mid-summer at Stone Barns, circulating around salvias, mountain mint, yarrow and lavender.  These bees also appear at Rockefeller State Park Preserve in early summer, feeding on mountain mint. 

 

Although these bees gather pollen in part from native plants, Carder bees are not native to New York. They are European in origin, and were introduced accidentally into New York in 1963. They have since spread through the United States and are currently found as far south in the Americas as Brazil and Argentina.  Carder bees nonetheless are not currently considered a significant threat to honey bees or other pollinators, and they do not transmit agents that lead to colony collapse disorder.

 

Identification information:  European wool carder bees have wide bodies, and are black with vivid yellow markings. Tufts of curly pale brown hair grow from the sides of the first five segments of the bees' abdomens.  The first three segments of their abdomens have yellow spots along the outside edges. The spots are widely set in the third and fourth segments and nearly touch in the last segments. These markings distinguish them from the A. obligatum wool carder bee shown below.  Adult male wool carder bees are hefty and nearly an inch long.  Nevertheless, these bees range in size and females can be much smaller than males -- under half an inch.