Smaller, bluer, does not eat houses, taillights of white hair, southern. Xylocopa micans. The "other" eastern carpenter bee. A pretty bee and largely overlooked compared to the Eastern Carpenter Bee X. virginica whose habit of boring into the soft woods that people, it would appear, have so graciously constructed for them gets them into a bit of trouble. This pretty Carpenter, however, ranges across the flat lands of the South where is eschews the home, barns, and fences inhabited by its more bourgeois cousin for a home in a modest stick. Check the box on pollination, but one of its little conservation problems is neat and tidiness, specifically males of the human species who feel compelled to clean up those messy woods with their rotten limbs around the house they bought to be closer to Nature so that they can create sacred lawn space, better detect invading forces and hang multiple bug zappers. Photo Brooke Alexander. Specimen collected by Sabrie Breland.
