“The female rolls the pollen into a ball, and pushes it to the back of the tunnel where she lays an egg. With a home constructed for her family, she “then visits local flowers to gather pollen and nectar,” said the University of Arizona. Within her tunnel, which extends perhaps six to 10 inches deep into wood, she excavates a gallery where she deposits her eggs. She leaves, in her wake, a small pile of sawdust beneath her construction site. Beginning in the spring, a female, like a miniature carpenter, will burrow a half-inch-diameter horizontal tunnel so perfectly circular that it could have been produced by a power drill. In the desert, carpenter bee females nest in sotol and various yucca and agave bloom stalks, or they may take up residence in dead tree trunks and limbs, firewood or wooden structures. The male valley carpenter bee has a tan-colored body, and the female, the usual black body, according to University of Arizona “Information Sheet 21” (Publication #196025). In some species, the male has a yellow face, and the female, a black face, according to the Oklahoma Cooperative Extension Service Internet site. Its legs have dense, electrostatically charged hairs to which pollen adheres when the insect visits blossoms. Typically, the carpenter bee has a bare, black, and polished-looking abdomen, or rear body segment, probably its most distinguishing feature. The valley carpenter bee occurs in Arizona and California.Ī robust insect roughly the size of a small pecan, the carpenter bee is the only really large bee in the Southwest that is metallic blue-black to black, according to Floyd Werner and Carl Olson, Insects of the Southwest. S., said Lane Greer, “Alternative Pollinators: Native Bees,” Appropriate Technology Transfer for Rural Areas Technical Note. The mountain carpenter bee, for example, occurs across the western U. Several carpenter bee species (of the seven in the United States) occur in the Southwest. The carpenter bee, along with some 25,000 other named species of bees in the world, belongs to an order called “Hymenoptera,” which also includes wasps, hornets and ants. In the near future, it may enlist, at the behest of researchers and farmers, in more commercial enterprises. The carpenter bee contributes substantially to the annual showcase of wildflowers in our desert basins and mountain flanks. As a reward, it wittingly takes pollen, nectars and oils that it uses to set a banquet table for its larvae. Diligently, if unwittingly, it gathers pollen grains from the male parts of blossoms and delivers them to the female parts of other blossoms (of the same species), triggering the process of fertilization and seed formation. The carpenter bee ranks as an important pollinator of the flowering plants, particularly those with large open fragrant blooms.
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