What is a Carpenter Bee Anyway?
The carpenter bee, along with some 25,000 other named species of bees in the world, belongs to an order called “Hymenoptera,” which also includes wasps, hornets and ants. Several carpenter bee species (of the seven in the United States) occur in the Southwest. The mountain carpenter bee, for example, occurs across the western U. S., said Lane Greer, “Alternative Pollinators: Native Bees,” Appropriate Technology Transfer for Rural Areas Technical Note. The valley carpenter bee occurs in Arizona and California. A robust insect roughly the size of a small pecan, the carpenter bee is the only really large bee in the Southwest that is metallic blue-black to black, according to Floyd Werner and Carl Olson, Insects of the Southwest. Typically, the carpenter bee has a bare, black, and polished-looking abdomen, or rear body segment, probably its most distinguishing feature. Its legs have dense, electrostatically charged hairs to which pollen adheres when the insect visits blossoms. In some spec
