The Urban Pantheist

The carpenter bees are crazy the past several days! At the zoo and elsewhere (a friend in NYC posted to facebook about it) HUGE SCARY BEES are scaring the hell out of everyone. I knocked this one out of the air with my hat and then picked it up with my bare hand. Not to show off (well, probably a little to show off) but to demonstrate that these are not dangerous insects. It's kind of hilarious how easily tricked we are, humans--the sapient primates, by an animal with a nervous system made of a few clusters of ganglia. Sure, the bees seem really menacing, darting suddenly at your face, buzzing loudly. But the most aggressive carpenter bees are the males--you can see this one is a male by the white square on his face. Why does that matter? Because male bees can't sting. They don't even have stingers. A male carpenter bee flying at a human's face is like a naked unarmed human charging at a tank--except that the tank is scared of insects and ducks squealing. The females can sting, but they are not very aggressive and rarely do.

Photo by cottonmanifesto. Location: rose bushes in front of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston.

Urban species #159: Carpenter bee Xylocopa virginica

Carpenter bees require exposed dead wood in which to excavate nests and lay their eggs. Fortunately for them, humans like to build with this substance, and so have greatly increased the amount of potential carpenter bee nest sites. The female chews her way into the wood, working with the grain whenever possible, and lays deposits her eggs, along with food packets of flower pollen and nectar, into the cavity.

Carpenter bees are considered both important pollinators and destructive pests. They can be frightening to some people, as they are quite large bees, but they are slow to rile and rarely sting. They are easy to confuse with bumblebees, which differ in that they are social, nest in the ground, and have yellow fur on their abdomen (carpenter bees have yellow fur only on their thoraxes, and have shiny black abdomens). Carpenter bees prefer to build nests in soft woods (mostly conifers), and so Boston's miles of blocks of triple-deckers made of eastern white pine provide abundant breeding space. And flowering ornamental shrubs and weeds are an ample supply of food for this urban species.

( round and round she goes )