Bullying Carpenter Bees—Part 1

The last couple of years have seen a passel of carpenter bees flying about and hovering in the air around our clearing in the woods. They zoom into your face, getting up close and personal—seemingly challenging your right to be there. They're big (at least an inch long) and they're noisy. Their buzz commands your attention and is rather unnerving, as you warily turn towards them, wondering if you are under attack. They intimidate people and seem to know it.

A carpenter bee is the size of a big ol' bumblebee. Where the latter is striped black and yellow with a hairy body, the carpenter bee's abdomen is black and shiny. Out of the corner of your eye one will be challenging you, looking like a miniature Darth Vader in his insidious space craft. It's distracting, at the least.

Carpenter bees were rather uncommon around here several years ago. I'd see one only occasionally, as it plunged into a perfectly round hole that it had drilled in wood; or emerging from said hole, to fly off, quickly out of sight. But in the last couple of years we have seen lots of them, in all parts of our clearing. Has global warming increased their numbers, as well as their swagger? Have we added a large enough number of wooden structures around the homestead, that the word is spreading around the carpenter bee world, about all the choice nesting sites here?

Whatever is happening, they have certainly become common, as they hover nearby, acting like miniature drones who are surveilling us. Several days ago—sort of in a paranoid mood—I found myself wondering if they actually could be tiny CIA drones. The government is more and more into monitoring us innocent citizens. (I know, I know; I have nothing to worry about, if I'm innocent... but what does innocent mean these days?) Cities have CCTV surveillance (they call them “security”) cameras perched everywhere, catching all sorts of nefarious activities. Maybe carpenter bee drones have been invented to keep an eye on us country folks?

I quickly shook off my paranoia, realizing that the bees' incredible flight acrobatics I am watching are well beyond the skills of the current generation of CIA drones. (Although they're improving on them all the time... maybe next year? Oops, there goes my paranoia again.)

The bees pestering us suddenly appear, hover for a moment, and then dart off at warp speed—instantly circling the garden shed and reappearing behind you, menacingly buzzing, three feet away. They are not just buzzing us; at times two of them will face off, spin around each other in a kind of bee aerial combat, and then scream off—one chasing the other. So these are real bees, not secret spies built by the CIA.

More on carpenter bees next time...