When dealing with these wood-lovers, the best offense is a good defense
An almost perfectly circular hole is the signature of the guilty party who drilled one into my husband’s potting bench. The circle, archetypal symbol of infinity, appears six times on the bench as a stubborn reminder of the life cycle of the eastern carpenter bee. Despite their turning the bench into a symbol for Swiss cheese, I like the rotund bees, whose sonorous hum resonates in spring and fall as they hang mid-air like vigilant hovercraft, close to their home-sweet-homes.
The eastern carpenter bee looks like a bumblebee and is just as clumsy, often bouncing off objects in its path. The only differentiating clue is that bumbles have hairy chests with yellow fuzz, but carpenters’ chests are hairless and glossy black. (It’s really the abdomen, not the chest, but I claim poetic license.)
Though the same size, genders have differentiated features. Females’ completely black heads are broader, while males have yellow or white faces and bigger eyes, proving once again that Mother Nature protects her wild daughters by making them less attractive and not allowing makeup. We see females less often than males since they stay close to hearth and home while males swagger around looking tough as they protect their little women and homes.
If humans venture into the nesting area, Mr. Macho zooms in for a closer look, often hovering eye-to-eye, then remembers, Oops, no stinger. He can threaten, but not sting. The female, however, is armed and licensed to sting, but usually won’t. She’s too focused on reproduction to be trigger-happy, using her weapon only if caught or touched.
Like all insects with short life spans, their raison d’être is mating for species survival. Mr. Macho gazes with his big eyes, hums, and hovers seductively, scoping the landscape for a mate. Smaller-eyed species spray pheromones like aftershave to lure females; but for our eastern species, the eyes have it when looking for love. Our hopeful suitor protects flowers from competing males, trusting he’ll be in the right place at the right time to spy a comely female, whom he chases until, exhausted, she succumbs to his charms.
Knowing her biological clock is ticking at an alarming speed, she builds her nest pronto by drilling into soft, decaying, or untreated wood; or she opts to redecorate and enlarge a previously owned home. If starting from scratch, she tears into the wood with her mandibles and excavates the wood, making a hole big enough for Her Roundness to enter. The sound of her body vibrating as she chews and rasps her mandibles against the wood fools some into believing her stinger is her drill.
Once she fits into the hole she has polished to a sheen, the wee carpenter works against the wood grain for about an inch, makes a sharp right turn, and proceeds according to the grain, heading up if it runs horizontally or across if it’s vertical. She tunnels for four to six inches; the more obsessive bees go up to thirteen inches. The bee “gallery” follows a triple-layered, T-shaped floor plan that evolves into a lovely split level home. Inside the tunnels, she adds walls of chewed-up wood, making a chamber for each egg, and stocks it with “bee bread” (elongated wads of pollen and nectar) topped with a freshly laid egg, the largest in insectdom. She seals each chamber, tucking the kids in like miniature mummies; but she can’t sit back, sip a glass of nectar, and watch the shopping channel. She dies when eggs are laid, mission completed.
Eggs hatch into grubby larval children who devour the food left by Mom and morph into homely teenaged pupae. They become legal adults in mid-to-late summer, wreck the house by tearing down walls to meet siblings, and rush to the exit, climbing over each other in haste to see the world beyond the tunnels. Come autumn, they bunk down together and awake in spring with but one thing on their tiny minds, following parental patterns of mating and nesting. Sisters may choose to live side by side in the same piece of wood, but not in a communal hive with one queen, like those social honey bees. These girls form a familial matriarchy with each the queen of her own nest.
The jury’s out on the bees’ fate. Some think carpenters are destructive and should die, and lethal options abound. Others see the bees as valuable pollinators and consider damaged wood a minimal and controllable concern.
When it comes to carpenter bees, your best offense is a good defense. The bees are pragmatic and choose to drill easily into neglected, untreated, unpainted, decayed wood or softwood like cedar or pine. Paint or varnish discourages drilling, as do repairs to decaying wood and replacement of softwood with hardwood. Nesting bees rarely do structural damage to homes; however, they may do cosmetic damage, which in the grand scheme of things doesn’t seem to justify destroying pollinators of fruits and vegetables that physically feed us (and flowers that aesthetically feed us).
Carpenter bees are effective pollinators for two reasons: bigger bodies carry more pollen and “buzz pollination” shakes out more pollen. These bees have “six-pack abs” in the thorax. To gather pollen, they clutch a flower and shimmy, rapidly vibrating their strong thoracic flight muscles to dislodge pollen from flowers’ anthers.
In many agricultural areas, carpenter bees are rock stars, and softwood is put out to encourage nest building. With documented diminishing honeybee numbers, it’s time to put down our insecticidal weapons and cultivate peaceful co-existence. Though it takes some work to keep the bees at bay, it’s less work than they do for us. I vote to let the bees be.
Lucile lives peacefully with her bees in Vicksburg, Mississippi, and plans to varnish the hole-pocked potting bench before next spring’s flock of pockers. She dedicates the article to Bobby Darin, who sang “If I Were a Carpenter.”
