Living in the woods, our family comes across Carpenter Bees quite often.  They can be real pests if they decide to bore holes in your deck in order to make tunnels for raising their offspring, but they are not actually feeding on the wood.   They collect nectar from flowers and aid in pollination like other bees.  See link.

While staking out a Rufous Hummingbird near our home in PA, I noticed a large black and white bee unlike any I had ever seen.  The hummingbird wasn’t cooperating, so I began taking pictures of the strange bee.  As you can see, it was covered with pollen from the Rose of Sharon flowers!  It seemed to prefer climbing deep down into the flower, which caused a virtual blanket of white dust to cover his legs and most everything else!  It’s amazing that he could even fly with such a heavy coating of pollen on him!