- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Along about this time of year, the calls come pouring into the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology and the Bohart Museum of Entomology.
- "I just saw a golden bumble bee. I think it's a new species! Can I name it?"
- "I just saw a huge bee and it's gold in color and all fluffy with green eyes!"
- "I just saw a huge bumble bee flying around in our backyard. It's yellow and I think it's a pest."
Not!
It's the male Valley carpenter bee, Xylocopa varipuncta, which native pollinator specialist Robbin Thorp, emeritus professor of entomology at the Department of Entomology and Nematology at the University of California, Davis, calls "the teddy bear" bee.
Like all male bees, it doesn't sting.
But what's unusual about this bee is its color, golden with green eyes. It's sexual dimorphism at its best, because the female Valley carpenter bees are solid black.
The Valley carpenter bee is the biggest carpenter bee in California. And it scares the living beejeez (dead beejeez, too) out of young children, teenagers, and adults. Just about everybody and everything, including the family dog and cat.
As Thorp told us several years ago for a news story:
"Xylocopa varipuncta occurs in the Central Valley and southern California, Arizona, New Mexico and southward through Mexico. It is large (about the size of a queen bumble bee), with all black females and golden/buff-colored males with green eyes. Females have dark wings with violet reflections."
Some folks think it's a pest. It's not. It's a pollinator. Let it "bee."
Cheers
One of my puppies keeps trying to catch them, so I'm relieved to hear that the males don't sting.
Never found a positive ID until now. They only are around on the spring. Thank for great website--CZ
More amazing, a female black bird spotted it, hopped down, walked 45 degrees around it, then *signaled* it to a male blackbird on a dining table, via this display: crouch down, fan tail feathers, fan left wind feathers directly opposite the bee, tilt head 45 degrees, then rotate head so her right eye made contact with the male, and her beak was pointed in a straight line thru the bee's location, to the male. Freeze. Neither bird showed a predatory instinct, on the contrary they were showing curiosity to give time for an instinct to trigger. Soon the bee took off and flew a straight line equally distant between the birds, who then went back to foraging for food scraps. First time seeing such a bee, and such incredible behavior in a common bird.
Yes, they are visiting flowers, then destroying my trees.
Los Angeles 90066
A beautiful male has been spending long hours almost every day in my yellow flowered Butterfly Bush. He doesn’t seem attracted to the three purple flowered Butterfly Bushes.