This mystery would be solved over a hundred years later.ĭespite the insect's size and position as the world's largest bee, decades went past without another sighting of what became known as Wallace's giant bee. At the time it was not known why the females had such a particularly large set of mandibles. He managed to collect just one female bee, describing it as 'a large black wasp-like insect, with immense jaws like a stag-beetle'. It was during these travels through the Malay Archipelago that he first formed the theory of evolution. The intrepid naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace is the first known to have collected the species in 1859, when he was exploring Bacan Island, part of the North Maluku islands of northern Indonesia. 'It was absolutely breathtaking to see this "flying bulldog" of an insect, to have real proof right there in front of us of it in the wild.' The world's largest species of bee Females are attracted from downwind and choose a male with which to mate.Clay Bolt, the wildlife photographer who took the images and video of the insects, says, 'To actually see how beautiful and big the species is in life, to hear the sound of its giant wings thrumming as it flew past my head, was just incredible. As a group (lek) they actively release their rose-scented blend of chemicals. Territorial males take up positions in non-flowering plants near other males. Its green-eyed golden males (the females are all black) have huge perfume glands in their thoraces. Using their mouthparts they cut a slit at the base of corolla and steal away with the nectar without having pollinated the flower.Ī widespread western US species, Xylocopa varipuncta, has an unusual mating system. On flowers such as salvias, penstemons, and other long, tubular flowers the carpenter bee, due to its large size, is unable to enter the flower opening. This type of pollen gathering is called “buzz pollination.” Carpenter bees are excellent pollinators of eggplant, tomato and other vegetables and flowers.įrom time to time carpenter bees are quite ingenious in their foraging for nectar. Using their powerful thoracic muscles carpenter bees sonicate the dry pollen grains out of the flower’s anthers. Carpenter bees land on flower blossoms they become living tuning forks. They, like bumblebees are early morning foragers. In our vegetable and flower gardens, carpenter bees are generalists and may be found foraging on a number of different species. However, unlike honey bees and bumble bees there are no queen or worker castes, only individual males and females. These observations have led some entomologists to consider carpenter bees primitively social. Biologists using observation nests or X-ray imaging techniques have observed returning foragers feeding other nest mates. Often newly hatched daughters, live together in their nest with their mother. These partition walls are very similar to particle board!Ĭarpenter bees are long lived, up to three years and there can be one or two generations per year. The female forms partitions between each egg cell by mixing sawdust and her saliva together. Inside their rounded branched galleries, they form pollen/nectar loaves upon which they lay their giant eggs (up to 15 mm long). Some species, like the eastern Xylocopa virginica, occasionally take up residence in fence posts or structural timbers, especially redwood, and become a minor nuisance. Using their broad, strong mandibles (jaws), they chew into dead but non-decayed limbs or trunks of standing dead trees. These gentle giants get their name from their life history habits of excavating precisely rounded galleries inside wood. In the United States carpenters bees can be found across the southern United States from Arizona to Florida and in the eastern United States, north to New York. There are numerous species of carpenter bees that inhabit a broad range of ecosystems from tropical to subtropical to temperate. Along with bumble bee queens, carpenter bees (genus Xylocopa) are the largest native bees in the United States.
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