European Woolcarder 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 woolcarder 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 woolcarder bee will ram the intruder like a miniature rhinoceros to knock it off the flower. 

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European woolcarder bees forage on a fairly wide variety of plants:  they are common visitors of 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.

 

Anthidium manicatum 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 they gather pollen in part from native plants, European woolcarder bees are not native to the United States. They are native to Europe, Asia and North Africa, and arrived in New York from Europe in 1963. They have since spread through the United States and are currently found as far south in the Americas as Brazil and Argentina.  Anthidium manicatum 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 woolcarder bees have wide bodies, and are black with vivid yellow markings.  Both males and females have yellow facial masks and yellow mandibles.  Their thoraxes are black with yellow markings.  On females, the legs are mostly black and covered with wooly white hairs.  On males, the legs are mostly yellow.

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The abdomens of European woolcarder bees have symmetrical yellow spots on the lateral edges -- these are widely spaced on the first three segments; on the remaining segments, the spots are more closely apced or may be absent.  On males, the rearmost segment of the abdomen (T7) is black.  The spot-like (rather than band-like) markings distinguish them from the Anthidium obligatum woolcarder bee shown below.  Adult male Anthidium manicatum are hefty and about an inch long.  Nevertheless, these bees range in size and females can be much smaller than males -- under half an inch.