Wool Carder Bee, Anthidium, Wilcox

Every time I'm in Westerly, which these days is pretty often, I try to stop by the town's lovely Wilcox Park in the center of downtown, to walk the grounds of this expansive botanical garden and check the various flowers for intriguing pollinators. At this point in the season, the stars of my show are usually the various milkweeds and those Monarch butterflies, which are still not back in the fold. But another plant I'm sure to be watching is a gray and fuzzy-leaved, domesticated Near Eastern native known as Lamb's Ear. The Wilcox gardens are lush with members of the Stachys byzantina clan, and today, for the first time this year, I spotted another immigrant treasure—a European Wool Carder Bee. Anthidium manicatum made its first appearance in this country in the 1960s and is now happily living in most states. The wasp-mimic bee, a fine pollinator, gathers the "wool" from plants like Stachys to line the insides of their nests, perhaps to offer a measure of comfort to the offspring the moms will never see.