One Redeeming Quality

   Carpenter bees are some of those critters that can be a downright nuisance.  Those gals (yes, it is the females that do the damage) can bore their way through any piece of wood.  It is hard to stop them once they make up their minds that your house is their house, too.  The female will start boring a tunnel into any chosen piece of wood and keep going until she has decided that she has enough nurseries for her babes.  That long tunnel was built with little side chambers to house an egg and pollen/nectar ball.  She does all the work herself with no help from her mate.  In fact, she is a loner and does not have a hive of worker bees to help her.  She does it...ALL.  Sometimes if she lives long enough, she will reuse her tunnel but, more oft than not, she dies from the toll that this work takes on her.  

  I was out working in the Small Gardens this morning when I noticed that dozens of carpenter bees were busy in the Mexican Hydrangeas.  The flower heads were literally crawling with bees.  These were bees that had just become adults and were out foraging for pollen and nectar.  They will keep busy between now and time to settle in for the winter.  Come spring, they will crawl back out of the tunnel and then start hunting mates.  The cycle will start anew with one lucky female claiming the old tunnel if the original female has died while the others will start drilling their own.

  With all the damage these bees can do to wooden structures, it is a good thing that they are important pollinators.  That is their one redeeming quality...other than the fact that they are extremely slow to sting.  Back when I was a kid, Granddad showed me how to find and plug the tunnels to make it harder for the bees to do too much damage.  If the female had to keep starting over with her tunnel, she would usually move off to a dead tree and leave the house alone.  I guess, I had better be on the lookout for those small round holes being drilled into the house, shed and greenhouse.  Let me find some plugs!  Not that it is going to do much good but, at least, it makes me think I am saving the Little Bayou House from collapse!