Appearance
The most visible physical difference (at a glance) between this species and a bumblebee is the abdomen. Eastern carpenter bees have a shiny black abdomen, with the only yellow hair present being at the base next to the thorax, while bumblebees have a very fuzzy abdomen, which in some species has large areas of yellow hair across the middle (this is visible and obvious). The female eastern carpenter bee also has a much broader head than bumblebees. Eastern carpenter bees can be sexed at a glance. Males have a patch of white or yellow cuticle on the face, as opposed to females, whose faces are black. Males are unable to sting, since a bee's stinger is a modified ovipositor (an egg laying organ).
Read more about this topic: Eastern Carpenter Bee
Famous quotes containing the word appearance:
“The aim of science is to apprehend this purely intelligible world as a thing in itself, an object which is what it is independently of all thinking, and thus antithetical to the sensible world.... The world of thought is the universal, the timeless and spaceless, the absolutely necessary, whereas the world of sense is the contingent, the changing and moving appearance which somehow indicates or symbolizes it.”
—R.G. (Robin George)
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—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
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—Marianne E. Neifert (20th century)