Wool Carder Bees at Work

Wool Carder bees Anthidium manicatum are always at work in the garden.

They continue to try to be menacing, chasing other bees away from nectar sources.

I keep trying to take great photographs of the females at work when they are scraping hairs off the underside of Lamb's Ears Stachys. But often they crawl into areas with many leaves overlapping so I have yet to take a "great" photo of them in action.

Here is a female grasping a fiber ball she created from the fiber, which is very soft.

Look carefully just behind the yellow marking on her face, and you'll see the pale ball of fiber she created.

Just after I took the photo, she flew off with the cottony mass to a nesting cavity.

Another Wool Carder bee finding nectar in a Lamb's Ear blossom.