Let’s bee neighbors
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VIC LEIPZIG AND LOU MURRAY
When we first moved to Southern California, I was afraid of the giant
black bees that hovered around the eaves of our house. They looked
more like Chinook cargo helicopters than insects. Vic reassured me
that they were merely harmless carpenter bees.
California carpenter bees (Xylocopa californica) have large plump
bodies with shiny black abdomens with no yellow markings. They can be
found in natural areas like Shipley Nature Center, the Jack Green
Nature Area, Bartlett Park, the Bolsa Chica mesa as well as your own
yard.
Males can be quite aggressive in defending their territory. If
they have decided that the wood under your eaves would be a good
place to nest, look out. They’ll get right in your face and scare the
living daylights out of you. But it’s all bluff. The males have no
stingers.
The females do have stingers but are quite docile. According to
bee literature, they don’t sting unless you try to confine them with
your bare hands. We’re not stupid enough to test that theory.
Unlike social honeybees, carpenter bees are loners. Individual
males will hang around likely nesting sites in the spring and defend
this territory hoping to snag a female. A female mates with him and
then builds her nest by herself, having nothing further to do with
the male. She’s as much of a loner as he is.
Usually she chooses a dead log for her nest, but in our urban
setting of many wooden houses and few dead logs, she takes the next
best thing. This is often the eaves of your house or your deck.
The female carpenter bee is quite the little construction worker.
Once she has found some wood that appeals to her maternal instincts,
she begins drilling. Lacking a cordless, variable speed drill like
the one I use for home repair projects, she chews a perfectly round,
bee-sized hole with her mouthparts. She doesn’t eat the wood; she
just chews it and spits it out.
Her instincts tell her to drill a hole straight in, about an inch
or two deep, which takes her about six days. Then she turns and chews
a hole at right angles to the entry hole. She burrows parallel with
the wood grain for about 4 to 6 inches, leaving a pile of coarse
sawdust below the entry hole. I proudly pointed out to Vic that the
female of the species does the carpentry work, but he countered that
it’s really just destruction. Harrumph. That’s the last time I’ll let
him use my power tools.
The next step is construction of the galleries. She lays an egg
and leaves behind a ball of “bee bread,” which is pollen and
regurgitated nectar. After sealing that section of the gallery, she
lays an egg in the next gallery cell, continuing until she has laid
six to eight eggs.
The larvae hatch from the eggs, eat the bee bread left behind for
their nourishment, then form pupae in about 30 to 40 days. The full
transformation to adulthood takes about three months. The new adult
bee chews its way out of the wooden nurse chamber and emerges in
August. These adults feed throughout the fall in preparation for
their winter hibernation. They generally hibernate in the galleries
in which they were raised. In the spring, they emerge to continue the
cycle of mating, and then die in the fall.
One carpenter bee doesn’t do much damage to a house or deck. But
unfortunately, the bees like to return to sites used in previous
years and enlarge the galleries. Often, several bees will use the
same entry hole, each building its own gallery off the main tunnel.
Eventually the tunnels may extend 10 feet back from the entry hole,
with many branches. With only one entry hole, a homeowner can only
guess by the pile of sawdust how extensive the hidden damage might
be.
Plugging up the dime-sized carpenter bee holes while there are
bees inside does no good. The bees just tunnel out through a new
opening. If you are concerned about an infestation of carpenter bees,
they can be controlled with relatively safe insecticides such as
boric acid or pyrethrins. However, prevention is the better approach.
Carpenter bees prefer unpainted woods, so keeping wood painted will
discourage these insects from setting up housekeeping in the first
place.
Since carpenter bees are local natives and act as pollinators,
they are a useful component of the natural environment. They will
live happily in nature if they can find suitable nesting sites, which
for them are generally dead logs. This is one reason why it is
important to leave some dead wood in parks and natural areas.
It’s hard to think of a dead tree as habitat, but in fact dead
trees are important components of the ecosystem. When they are still
upright, dead trees provide food for woodpeckers and perches for
raptors. Great blue herons like to nest in them. And when they fall,
they provide food for decomposers.
I’m no longer afraid of carpenter bees. They are just one more
interesting creature that shares the space around us here in
Huntington Beach.
* VIC LEIPZIG and LOU MURRAY are Huntington Beach residents and
environmentalists. They can be reached at [email protected].
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