A weak normal idempotent of an abundant semigroup was introduced by Guo [7]. In this paper, weak normal idempotents and normal idempotents of abundant semigroups are respectively characterized in many different ways. These results enable us to obtain an example which shows that the class of normal idempotents of abundant semigroups is a proper subclass of normal idempotents of abundant semigroups. Furthermore, this example tell us that there exists a non-regular abundant semigroup containing a weak normal idempotent. At last, we investigate the relationships between weak normal idempotents and normal idempotents and deduce that the main result of [2] can not be generalized into the class of abundant semigroups.