A Fallen Carpenter…

The giant murder hornet story is fading from the public conscience and maybe that is for the best.  I was saddened to hear all sorts of stories of people going berserk and wiping out hives of honeybees and suchlike overreactions (although if anyone attacked any yellowjackets, I maybe wouldn’t shed too many tears over such an outcome–not that yellowjackets are apt to be phased by anyone coming after them with anything less than a flamethrower anyway). But the bigger point here is that bees are our lovable friends and we need to cherish them!

To underline this, here is an annex story to go with all of the little watercolor pictures I painted in the flower garden during quarantine.  This is a carpenter bee, one of 500 difficult-to-tell-apart species in the genus Xylocopa.  Carpenter bees are gentle bees: Male bees have no stinger and female bees rarely sting anyone unless they are severely provoked.   They are called carpenter bees because they like to raise their families within little chambers inside bamboo or timber (which means you may want to watch poorly stored stacks of lumber to keep these guys from boring perfectly round holes in the boards).

Anyway, as I was painting there was a sad buzz and a little thud.  A furry black bee fell out of the sky and was lying on one of the bricks in my garden! He lay there dazed for a bit and then tried to take off,  but only emitted an arrhythmic hum before keeling over on his side like The Dying Gaul (albeit with far more appendages and eyes). I don’t know how to resuscitate bees, but they are famously needy of energy (and strongly affiliated with a certain sugary natural source of metabolic energy) so I went inside and put some honey on a little stick and put it next to him. The bee weakly crawled over to the honey and eagerly lapped at the sweet amber like an addict, but then after a few more timorous buzzes he just sat there in the sunshine.

I sort of expected to see a brown creeper fly down and eat the tired carpenter bee like a socialite gobbling up a fig wrapped in bacon, however it seems like my scheme worked:  an hour later there was a more substantial buzz from the brick and then moments later I saw a pair of carpenter bees slaloming off into the crabapple blossoms overhead! Of course the bee didn’t really do anything for me in this story (aside from pollinating my crops, holding up the ecosystem, and not stinging me) yet the whole incident gave me a sort of happy glow.  Here is a blurry picture I took of the little guy.  I hope he is ok out there in Brooklyn these days.  Maybe I need to get one of those little carpenter bee houses.

My neighbor, the carpenter bee

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