Carp Without Cars

I’ve heard male crickets singing at night since I was a young boy, but I’ve never seen one singing. A few weeks ago Linda and I started hearing one in the backyard, and one evening I was interested enough to head out with a flashlight. I didn’t expect I’d actually be able to find the cricket; I’d always believed (without ever testing it) that crickets are natural ventriloquists, very hard to locate by ear, and that the insect would stop singing as I approached.

But no, it turns out this cricket was quite happy to let me locate and sneak up on him, and continued singing even as I got close enough (too close, it turns out) to snap this photo:

I say “too close” because the image is a little out of focus, something I didn’t notice until I got inside and uploaded the image to my computer. But by then I couldn’t go back and try for a better-focused shot, because while taking the above image I accidentally jostled a branch, causing him to stop singing and lower his wings (which are in their raised, singing position in that shot above). Here’s an even-fuzzier shot I got after he lowered his wings:

I got in trouble with Linda for making the cricket stop singing, and she forbade me to bother it any more; she’s still mad about it two weeks later. So that’s the best I can do, image-wise.

It turns out, though, that there’s lots of information about tree crickets (which is what this guy was) online; so I’ve since learned that this was probably either a snowy tree cricket (Oecanthus fultoni), which is found all through the lower 48 states, or a Riley’s tree cricket (O. rileyi), found only in the western states.

To tell the difference, I could have examined the little black markings in the first two segments at the base of the insect’s antennae. Or I could have carefully measured the temperature, and the rate at which the insect was chirping; Riley’s chirps are somewhat slower for a given temperature, while snowy chirps are somewhat faster. Snowy chirps also are faster in western populations than eastern ones, possibly because that helps the insects distinguish themselves from Riley’s.

I love the Internet.

Lots more about tree crickets is available at http://www.oecanthinae.com/, which apparently is the product of an amateur tree cricket lover who got bit by the bug (so to speak) fairly hard.

Finally, here’s 7 seconds of video of a male snowy tree cricket singing, courtesy of YouTube user TreeCricketFan, who may be the same hard-bitten obsessive mentioned above, or a different one; I’m not sure:

(Wikipedia image by Matthew Field.)

I’ve noticed this bee several times over the past few years: gigantic (bumblebee-sized or bigger), a beautiful golden color all over, with a habit of hovering for minutes at a time, pausing a few seconds in one place, moving a few feet, hovering again, and repeating, in a circuit that causes it to cruise a limited area over and over. Every time I’ve seen it engaged in this “hover patrol” it has been near some flowers being visited by ordinary honeybees, but I’ve never seen the giant golden bee actually land. I might be reading too much into it, but I get the impression that the bee is aware of me; it seems to face me and check me out, then decides I’m uninteresting and moves on.

I’ve seen this bee in our front yard in Carp, and outside the office building where I work in Santa Monica. (I’ve mentioned my ridiculously long commute, right?) Last Sunday William and I watched one patrolling outside some condos on Sandyland Road, as we walked from the State Beach campground (where we spent the night Sunday night) to the marsh and back.

I asked William what he thought the bee was doing. What’s up with that ceaseless patrol? It has to have a reason, I argued. The bee wouldn’t devote all that energy to the behavior unless there was some point to it.

I’ve tried to google for information about the bee before, without success. Today I tried again, and hit the jackpot.

The bee is the Valley carpenter bee, Xylocopa varipuncta. I’m used to seeing the female patrolling the eaves of houses and other wooden structures, looking for good spots to make a nest hole, and I knew that big black bee was a carpenter bee, but I never realized that this big golden bee was the male of the same species. An article from the UC Davis Department of Entomology quotes entomologist Lynn Kimsey as follows:

Carpenter bees, measuring about an inch long, are the largest bees in California. Their eggs are the largest of all insect eggs. The Valley carpenter bee egg can be 15mm long.

The males are territorial, Kimsey said, and can be quite aggressive. They hover and lie in wait for passing females.

“Female carpenter bees sting, but the males don’t have that apparatus,” Kimsey said. “You can pick up the fuzzy males and they won’t sting you.”

User INaturalist at bugguide.net posted this great image of the bee:

INaturalist wrote:

These big chubby guys come out in the spring and fly around in the willows where Coyote Creek flows into the percolation ponds. In Sunnyvale I find them in the Baccharis at the WPC ponds. They have a very short flight season — a couple of weeks and they’re gone. The females are black and yellow. This one is a drone — presumably its only function is to mate, so what is it doing patrolling? Waiting for a receptive virgin queen to emerge?

I think INaturalist’s speculation is probably right: The bee is on the lookout for females, and is patrolling a territory he’s staked out that seems likely to attract them.

So: Another mystery solved. :-)