Hmmm.
Carpenter bee = nest in wood.
I should have thought of that.
Perhaps you'd like some more information about bumble bees, Bob. Bumble bees are eusocial (or truly social) like honey bees, with a queen laying eggs, workers doing all the jobs, and drones just mating with virgins. Bumble bees' life cycle is very similar to social wasps, with virgin queens mating in the fall and hibernating in leaf litter or bunch grasses over the winter. Early in the spring they emerge and start a nest, caring for the first round of workers by themselves, sometimes including sitting on them like a mother bird to keep them warm if temperatures are cold.
After the workers mature, they will take over caring for the next rounds of brood and foraging. Bumble bees make little wax pots, like you can see in your picture, to raise brood in and store a little bit of honey and pollen. In the fall the colony will make a round of drones and virgin queens who will go out to start new nests in the spring. The parent colony including the mother queen will die off as winter approaches, and the cycle will start again.
Bumble bees, along with carpenter bees, are important pollinators of plants that require buzz pollination, where the plants only release their pollen through vibration, or plants that bloom very early in the season when it's too cold for smaller bees to fly. Bumble bees can actually control their body temperature somewhat by unhooking their flight muscles from their wings and buzzing "internally" to generate heat, and some can even fly in temperatures just above freezing.
The species in both yours and Jim's picture is probably
Bombus impatiens or the Eastern Bumble Bee, the most common bumble bee east of the Mississippi.
Topic: Carpenter bee nest (Read 1368 times)