We have talked a good deal about the birds I encountered while in TN, but something else I kept coming across from MD, to TN and now, here on the Cape, were bees- Carpenter bees to be exact. I really have a provincial mind, so when I saw a fairly big and active group of large bees buzzing about the buildings where my husband was in a meeting, I thought, how odd to see so many Bumblebees together, so early in the season.
The first Bumblebee out, bumbling around in spring, is always the Queen; everyone else had his or her RIP prior to the winter. She is the only survivor of the colony, hibernating through the winter, already fertilized and ready to go when spring arrives. Then she finds a suitable hole in the ground and starts gathering pollen to form into a ball and lay her eggs on. Then later in the summer, she will have company, and workers and her hive will have begun.
So, to see twenty or so large, bees buzzing around was a mystery. Until my friend who lives in MD, pointed out that these were Carpenter bees. They closely resemble Bumblebees except their abdomen is shiny and hairless rather than soft and fuzzy. But what were they doing, I wondered? Chasing each other, flying so high into the sky that they were just specks against the blue. Was this amore, or was it aggression? It’s hard to tell the two apart sometimes. Yeah again for Google. It was aggression. Males are pretty territorial, and will chase each other around, yet never actually come to blows, for the male has no stinger.
For that matter, they like to toy with us I think, for they are known to fly straight at you which, no doubt, freaks out many a non-bee lover. Some say they are just curious little buggers. Love to check out anything new, and often that is you. No ill will intended. I wonder how many found themselves smushed between the Sports section by someone who did question their motives. Curiosity might kill more than just the cat.
The females do have stingers, but they are so busy tending to the work of chewing out brooding tunnels that they have neither time for stinging, nor for dashing about to satisfy their curiosity. They are the proverbial “busy bees”. Carpenter bees are called that, because they dig their brood tunnels in wood, your deck railing doing very nicely, thank you. Now they aren’t like termites, you don’t end up with shredded lace for wood, just an excavated 6” tunnel pretty close to the surface of the wood. I love that it said you could hear her chewing the wood from several feet away. Something to listen for in my twilight years. Each inch takes about one week to chew. My jaws are sore just thinking about it.
Once she has completed the chamber she will make a nice tasty ball of pollen and nectar and lay an egg on it. She seals off that chamber with chewed wood and bee spit, I suppose, and then makes another. Not the 1,000 of eggs laid a day for her, let the Honeybee be the winner of all egg laying awards, she is content to have a family of 7-8 bees. And here’s another neat thing. The last one laid in the chamber is the first one out. After all, it is closest to the door. “And the last shall be first” sort of arrangement. It will take them about 3 months to complete their life cycle from larvae to adult, so if they have chosen your deck railing, you won’t meet the family until late summer.
They are important pollinators, so one should be happy if you have some nearby. What’s a little tunnel in your deck railing compared to the successful pollination of your flowers and veggies? I had my Nature walk with my ladies on Weds and we found some Carpenter bees busily tunneling out a bench at the Game Farm where we walk, and they had left quite an impressive pile of sawdust. That’s another good way to find them, impressive piles of sawdust. And one last amusing, but I wonder if it is true, fact about them. One sight claimed they were pretty clumsy fliers, smacking into fence posts and the like, not always coming in for the smoothest of landings. We will all take note, any dazed bees you may find who seem to have suffered a crash landing, check out that shiny abdomen and see if it is a Carpenter bee and if what they say about their, less then stellar, flying ability is true. The ones I watched sure were zippy and didn’t seem to be smacking into things. Guess you can’t believe everything you read on the Internet! Would that include this Blog? Heavens no, I am trying to feed you truth.
Which reminds me, a correction. I said in one article about the naked headed cardinal, that birds don’t tend to preen each other’s heads. What was I thinking, your pet parakeets do, and some ducks, and a few other lovey dovey types. But many don’t, so a mite on the head of a bird still has a pretty good chance of munching away untouched. Truth, see I try my best to search for Truth! And truly this has gone on too long today. Adieu.
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