Field Notes—

The Carpenter Bees That Came To Stay

By Curtiss Clark

We can hear when the privet hedge is in bloom. It hums.

In late spring and early summer, the small while flowers attract bees, butterflies, and moths. The hedge skirts a screened-in porch, and all the insect activity draws the intense interest of the cats sunning themselves there. Their heads snap around in synchrony, reacting to the sudden sounds and motions in the hedge. Their sustained concentration on the unfathomable randomness of insect motion must yield profound insights, but they keep such wisdom to themselves. They never communicate anything to us, except their desire to eat.

My own lax and distracted observations of the insect privet-fest lead to wistfulness, not wisdom. I miss the honeybees.

Just five or six years ago, honeybees would raise the decibel level of the hedge far beyond what it is today. But feral honey bees have all but vanished from the countryside, and now there is disheartening news from beekeepers that stresses on domestic bee populations from persistent parasites, including varroa and tracheal mites, and the new worrisome threat, colony collapse disorder, may make honeybees in a privet hedge a rarity.

Having lost the reassuring company of these pollen-pocked golden gems in our yard, Kate and I have decided to throw out the welcome mat for whatever replacement pollinators happen upon our place. We are keeping chemicals off the lawn and trees and are working to establish a landscape with plenty of blossoms to attract nectar lovers of every stripe. Some of the insects, like the butterflies and moths, are more loveable than others. And the bumblebees, which have taken up much of the slack since the honeybees started disappearing, are welcome companions in the yard. They are slow to anger and are efficient pollinators.

Then there are the various wasps and yellowjackets, which are less loveable, but reliable indicators of a healthy natural habitat.

This year, we are even extending the boundaries of our insect tolerance to include a family of carpenter bees, not that our hospitality has won us the least bit of deference or gratitude from the new arrivals.

Carpenter bees resemble bumblebees, but their abdomen is shiny black. The females have a black head, while the males have white markings on the head. As their name suggests, they live in wooden houses, unlike bumblebees, which live in the ground. Two things alerted us to the arrival of this family of carpenter bees. A pile of sawdust under one of our fence rails, and a male loitering nearby — in midair.

Just above the pile of sawdust on the ground, on the underside of the fence rail, was a perfectly round hole nearly a half inch in diameter.

Carpenter bees, like other bees, feed on pollen and nectar. They do not eat wood. But the females, who are the homebuilders for this species, tunnel into raw wood (they prefer unpainted surfaces) with their powerful mandibles and chew out galleries for their brood and for shelter of both males and females through the winter. They produce one new generation per year. Over time, their woodworking can damage a structure, but in our fence rail, their nest is harmless enough.

Male carpenter bees are quite aggressive, but Nature in its wisdom did not equip them with stingers. The females will sting, but only if provoked.

The males can be seen in early summer hovering nearby the excavated nests warning strangers away. Deprived of biological weapons, they resort to psychology to keep intruders at bay. When you’re a bee of any kind, a little intimidation goes a long way.

Kate and I recently dragged a couple of chairs out onto the lawn to read the newspaper in the morning sun. Warm, relaxed, and wandering far from awareness along the path of my reading, I became the perfect target. The male carpenter bee hovering at the nearby fence rail attacked, ramming the back of my neck with a buzzing exoskeletal crunch that caused my autonomic nervous system to lace my fight or flight reaction with a dose of adrenaline. Choosing flight, as I always do when angry buzzing things lodge themselves in my collar, the adrenaline propelled me clear out of my chair and rolled me ten feet down the lawn, much to Kate’s initial concern and eventual amusement.

So, yes, we are hosting a thug and his family in our fence rail. We could plug up the hole that leads to their lair at night, trapping them there, and ending the kind of insect impertinence that lays low a 6’3” 200-pound man.

In the end, however, we remain partial to pollinators and don’t want to lengthen their odds for survival. So we will live and let live. But as I said, I miss the honeybees.