Carpenter Bee, a Major Pollinator

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Carpenter Bee on Privet
Image Copyright 2001, David L. Green

Xylocopa virginica

Wherever honey bees are absent in South Carolina, eastern carpenter bees have taken over the primary role of pollinating many of the spring blossoms. These fruits such as wild plums and cherries, and many drupe fruits are quite important to birds and wildlife, not to speak of fruits that are important to us. I have observed in peach and kiwi orchards that carpenter bees are the only bee with significant presence before honeybees are brought in.

This bee is extremely important to our wild pollination and should be protected wherever possible. As this dramatic little lady illustrates with her coat of pollen, they are highly efficient pollinators.

Like bumblebees and honeybees, they have a static charge and they are quite fuzzy. In the low country of South Carolina, there is a precious reserve of these bees in the many abandoned tobacco packhouses that dot the fields. Here the bee can exist unmolested by uptight homeowners, and do its job. It is also dormant by the time of cotton bloom, so it has some protection from pesticide misuse (application while bees are foraging). Unfortunately it is also dormant for most of the bloom of canteloupe and watermelon, though I have seen some crown bloom pollination from carpenter bees on early plantings of these crops.

While they are excellent pollinators of open-faced fruit blooms, such as apple, crabapple, peach, pear, Bradford pear, wild cherry, plum, kiwifruit, holly and privit, the carpenter falls down on some flowers with deep corollas, such as blueberries, when it often punctures the flower and sips the nectar without pollinating.