My dad has a garden that he plants in his backyard every year.
- He grows lots of peppers, tomatoes, squash, as well as various green veggies.
I love it when his garden is filled with veggies because I always get a huge basket of goodies each year. Last year, I had tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, as well as green beans. The veggies are so much better than the ones that I buy in the store. Anyway, my mom loves to go into the garden to pick veggies every day. However, she does not like bugs, especially the ones that can fly. One morning, I was on the phone with her, and she refused to pick some tomatoes because there were some random pollinator flying around in the garden. She had no idea what it was, so I asked her to take a picture and send it to me. When she did, I thought it was a bumble bee because of the size. However, it didn’t resemble the typical bumble bee that I was used to seeing. It lacked the yellowish stripe of a normal bumble bee. In fact, the bee in the picture was mostly black. But my mom kept insisting that it wasn’t a bumble bee, and to my surprise she was right. After a quick search on the internet, I discovered that it was a carpenter bee. They are a distant cousin of the bumblebee but are an entirely different species. One of the main distinctions between a carpenter and a bumble bee is that the carpenter bee has no hair on its abdomen. I learned something new that day because I had no idea that the carpenter bee even existed.