Monday, November 30, 2009

Handiwork of the Carpenter Bee

I'd walked by this White Pine many a time over the past year and sometimes stopped to ponder the perfectly round holes. Too perfect for a bird, almost like a power drill, the answer came from articles in Val Littlewood's Pencil and Leaf blog. Thanks Val! :-) Do check out her wonderful and growing series of bees!



Don't the Carpenters perform a fine job? Notice how they work through each annual ring, through the harder and softer parts of each year's growth.



Just to give an idea of actual size...



Here's a bit of frass left over after construction. What didn't come through that well was a whitish material that I suspect was blocking off some inner chambers. (It shows up rather fuzzy here.)






4 comments:

  1. Thank you John.. and lets hear a round of applause for the wonderful carpenter bees. The more I learn about bees in general the more special I think they are. In fact all the pollinating insects in general. The complicated interdependent relationship between them and plants is astonishing, very sophisticated and sometimes quite fragile. I see clearly now how eliminating one tiny link in the chain, like a habitat, can have disastrous consequences. But I think the carpenter bees, at least, are safe for a while.

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  2. Frighteningly fragile, and something I hadn't realized before watching a PBS Nature show, Silence of the Bees.

    http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/episodes/silence-of-the-bees/full-episode/251/

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  3. Who knew? Not me! I had read Val's post about these bees and saw her cross section photo illustrating the bees' tunnels inside the tree- but I never associated the holes that I saw in trees with bees until I saw your photos. I had always thought they were woodpecker holes! Fascinating-and another thing to photo and record for my journal.
    thanks to both you and Val!
    ~gretchen

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  4. It seems that most web photos of entrance holes focus on building damage.

    Just another reason to leave standing dead wood in safe areas. I love the dead trees in the wetland behind my house. They're full of chickadee, woodpecker, and squirrel nests. I'll need to look closer for bee holes once everything freezes over.

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