Galápagos carpenter bee
The Galápagos carpenter bee is the only bee that has always lived on the Galápagos Islands. The female is shiny and black, while the rarer male has yellow-brown hair. It is the islands' most important flower helper, carrying pollen from bloom to bloom.
How fast is it?
Fun facts
It is called a carpenter bee because the female drills holes into soft dead wood to make a nest for her eggs.
Males guard a bush or tree and chase away other animals, but they let female bees in.
A museum has a very rare one that looks like a female on its left side and a male on its right side.
Only three kinds of bees live on the Galápagos, and the other two were brought there by people.
Some birds that people brought to the islands hunt these bees.
Most asked questions about Galápagos carpenter bee
?Why is it called a carpenter bee?
Because the female drills holes into soft dead wood to make her nest.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Xylocopa darwini
- Group
- Bees and bumblebees
- Family
- Apidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Hymenoptera > Apidae
- Lives on
- South America
Where the facts come from
- Xylocopa darwini (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0): what it looks like, where it lives, what it eats, sizes and fun facts, retold in simple words.
- Picture by Peter coxhead. CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons. The sticker of this bug is drawn from this picture.
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