the essentials in brief
- the Wooden bee (Xylocopa) is also called the blue wooden bee, black wooden bee or large wooden bee
- Wooden bees are threatened with extinction and are therefore under protection
- With dead wood or a bee hotel and flowers rich in nectar, bees can settle in the garden
- Wooden bees are very peaceful, but they can also sting
Blue, black, or large wooden bee
Many names, one bee: Behind the names "Blue Wooden Bee", "Black Wooden Bee", "Blue Black Wooden Bee" or "Large Wooden Bee" is one and the same type of bee: Xylocopa. It has a black body and blue wings and is significantly larger than its striped cousins, which is why all names are entirely appropriate.
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Can wooden bees sting?
Wood bees can sting like any other type of bee. However, they do this very rarely and only when they feel really threatened. Wood bees are solitary insects and are very shy and therefore not very dangerous. Should you ever have the rare bad luck of being stung by a wooden bee, treat the sting like any other bee or wasp sting:
- Remove the stinger
- rub a raw onion slice on the sting
- cool the sting
- A paste made from baking soda and water disinfects and cools
- Essential oils such as clove oil, mint oil or lavender oil disinfect and reduce itching
Digression
Fight wood bees
Usefulness of wood bees
Why wooden bees are on the Red List of the Federal Agency for Nature Conservation is of course primarily due to their decline in numbers. Stopping this is a requirement of general biodiversity, which is necessary in the long term for a balanced ecological macro system.
In the case of many protected species, their immediate usefulness is pointed out - this can ultimately motivate more private individuals with gardens to take part in the protection of the species in question.
Of course, the wooden bee is also an important link in the ecosystem. Like all bees, it also takes on a role as a plant pollinator - but this is only moderately pronounced, because wood bees have the habit of acting as so-called nectar robbers. So they have the habit of stealing their nectar from some plant blossoms without anything in return: Because they are equipped with strong mandibles, which they also have for the Is used to building a nest, it sometimes just bites its way through particularly deep, difficult-to-reach flowers - the pollination effect may remain completely on the Route.
Normally, however, wood bees perform their pollination task very well when collecting nectar. Because of their long tongue, they are particularly specialized in daisy, butterflies and mint family. Large wooden bees like to fly to the lip flowers of clary sage or the butterfly flowers of wisteria. They do not have to pierce the flower base either, so they pollinate the beautiful garden plants diligently. It's nice to see it here:
Youtube
How do you deal with wooden bees?
Given the threat to species, you should generally welcome wood bees to your garden. It is certainly not necessary to drive them away - even if their large, black and loudly humming presence can be a bit strange at first. The animals are by no means particularly dangerous or even harmful.
In view of the rather poor supply of suitable living space across the country, it is commendable if you try to offer the animals a home. You can do this in a number of ways. Above all, it makes sense to create space for possible nesting sites. For example through the following measures:
- Don't meticulously clean up dead wood
- If necessary, create a bee hotel
Leave dead wood in the garden
If you have an old tree in the garden that is not yet in danger of falling over and does not bother you too much, you should leave it wherever possible. It not only offers wooden bees a wonderful basis for creating their nesting passages, but also a diverse livelihood for other insect, mammal and bird species.
Since wooden bees are also very faithful to their location, an old tree offers them an excellent place to live that they can use again and again. On the trunk you can also closely observe the amazing, busy drilling activity of individual wooden bees.
Leaving other dead wood, such as broken, rotten branches, is of course also worthwhile for the habitat of wooden bees. In order not to let the look of the garden become too crude, you can also cleverly arrange individual, shapely old branches at the edges of the beds or on the bank of a garden pond.
Bee hotel
A bee hotel looks pretty and attracts many beneficial insects into the garden
If you have a more tidy garden style and want to keep it, it is advisable to create an insect or insect garden. of a specific bee hotel. You can design this in such a way that other useful bees also have nesting opportunities in it. For wooden bees, the bee hotel should of course be equipped with as much solid but rotten old wood as possible. Older branch discs can also look very decorative with clearly marked annual rings and larger cracks. The wooden bees also find good contact points for their drilling activities in the cracks.
But wooden bees also like to use stems filled with firm pulp or hollow stems as nesting sites. Japanese stems, for example, are recommended Knotweed, Reeds or bamboo. According to the size of the wooden bees, the cross section of the stems should be about 5-9 mm. If you have been living with wooden bees in your garden for a long time, you can use a hole in an old nesting site as a guide for the cross-section of any plant stems. Some other wild bee species also feel very comfortable in plant stems.
The genus of wood bees
The wood bees, zoologically Xylocopa, are one of a total of three genera within the family of real bees. They are therefore closely related to the honey bees from the Apinae genus.
As is so often the case with animal species, their scientific and translated name comes from their way of life: Xylocopa means something like “the wood cutter” - and indeed wood bees are allowed to work intensively on wood when building their nests own. With their powerful mouthparts they drill passages into tree branches and rotten trunks, but sometimes also into wooden parts of human structures such as fence posts.
How much wood they remove when creating their long corridors can be seen from the wood chips that arise under their nesting sites. In areas where they are more numerous, they are sometimes also fought because of their wood-drilling activity.
Taxonomy and occurrence
The genus of the wood bees comprises a total of 500 species within 31 subfamilies worldwide. Most of them live in tropical and subtropical areas, because the animals are extremely warmth-loving. Only 8 species have come to terms with European climatic conditions, and only 3 species are found in Central Europe. Due to the ever warmer climate, wooden bees can be spotted more and more frequently in our local gardens, even if they are generally rare. Wood bees have spread noticeably in the southern federal states such as Baden-Württemberg, Rhineland-Palatinate, Saarland, Bavaria and Hesse.
Digression
Pigeon tail
The pigeon tail can be found more and more often in our latitudes
Appearance
Wood bees are relatively easy to distinguish from other real bees or wild bees. One of the most obvious distinguishing features is, on the one hand, their coloration, which is not black and yellow like some other real bees considered typical by laypeople: Rather, most wood bees are characterized by a deep black color, often accompanied by shimmering metallic nuances in blue to purple on the body and on the Wings.
The stature also differs significantly from honey bees or other types of bees: wood bees have an unusually large and stocky build, similar to those of Bumblebees resembles. (whereby bumblebees also belong to the real bees)
way of life
Wood bees have a one-year cycle that differs in some ways from other solitary bees. First of all, it is unusual for wood bees to hibernate both females and drones. To do this, individually or in groups, they look for a place protected from wind, rain and cold, such as a self-dug hole in the ground or a wall or wooden crevice. The old nest is also sometimes used as winter quarters.
The new wood bee year begins in April. Then, after waking up from the Hibernation, females and drones come together to mate. Then the female individually begins to create a nesting site. To do this, it drills brood tubes in older, but still relatively solid wood and sets up around 10 to 15 brood chambers in them. An egg is placed in each of them and provided with a pack of provisions. This consists of a mixture of registered bee pollen, nectar and head gland secretion. Finally, the incubation chambers prepared in this way are closed and the larvae are left to their own devices.
The larvae develop on their own with the food provided. After about 2 months they pupate and become the finished wooden bee within a few days. As such, they eat their way out of their wooden brood chamber and can begin their lives as adults.
The females live relatively long compared to other solitary bees. After wintering, they often live well into summer and can watch their offspring develop. After they hatch, a kind of generational flat share is sometimes even founded.
Here again a small, overview-like profile about the wooden bees:
| Zoological classification | Appearance | Occurrence | way of life | Special identifying features |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Belong to the family of real bees within the suborder of the stinging voices and the suborder of the waist waseps | Compared to other species of real bees, the physique is quite large and compact like a bumblebee (14th century) up to 28 cm in length), coloring strikingly deep black, often with a metallic sheen in blue to purple overdrawn | In Central Europe only 3 species are represented, these predominantly in southern to southeastern countries, im German-speaking areas, especially in Switzerland, Austria and Germany in federal states such as Baden-Wuerttemberg, Bavaria, Saxony, | Solitary way of life, i.e. living individually, no formation of states, one-year cycle, females and drones both overwinter | large, deep black, corpulent appearance, loud hum when flying |
This video shot by Nabu Thuringia gives an impression of the wooden bee and its way of life:
Youtube
Identify wood bee species
Large wooden bee (Xylocopa violacea)
The large wooden bee, zoologically Xylocopa violacea, has several surnames that quickly lead to the assumption that there are species of their own. In fact, the blue wooden bee, the blue-black wooden bee, the violet-winged wooden bee and the common wooden bee can be placed in a pot with the heading 'Large wooden bee' or 'Xylocopa violacea'. Sometimes the species even becomes Black hornet called because their body size and also the dark color reminds a little of the large relatives from the subfamily of the real wasps.
With the color-designating side names are the decisive distinguishing features of the large wooden bee already defined: their wings are actually crossed by veins that shimmer from blue to purple. Your abdomen is deep black, bumblebee-like, rounded and dense and hairy, the middle segment of the body, the thorax, is a little lighter and tends to be bluish-gray. Overall, large wooden bees - as their main name suggests - reach a quite impressive size. They can be up to 28 millimeters long.
(Xylocopa iris)
Like the large wooden bee, this species of wood bees is one of the few species that are also widespread in Central Europe. You can find it mainly in the Mediterranean area, it is also represented in the near southeast to Central Asia. Specimens have also been found in certain regions in Switzerland and Austria. With us in Germany it occurs more in the south, if at all.
With a body length of 14 to 16 millimeters, the Xylocopa iris remains significantly smaller than the large wooden bee, but its stature is similarly compact and bumblebee-like. Her whole body is deep black, the abdomen shimmers slightly in a metallic, sometimes greenish blue.
Eastern wood bee (Xylocopa valga)
The Xylocopa valga has long, black antennae
The species Xylocopa valga is known in German as the eastern or black probe wooden bee. It is the third (and last) species found in central Europe. It is particularly widespread in southern to south-eastern Central European countries such as Italy, Slovenia, Romania, Serbia and Greece. In Germany, the eastern wood bee has been found sporadically in Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria and Saxony.
In its appearance it resembles the large wooden bee in certain aspects, above all it has a similarly thick, Bumblebee-like and black-colored abdomen and, like Xylocopa violacea, reaches a total length of up to 28 Centimeters. A characteristic feature, which is also recorded in one of the common names of this species, are the striking and consistently deep black antennae. The wings are black with a metallic, bluish tinge.
Other species that occur in Europe:
Not directly in Germany, but in the wider European area, especially in the Balkans, the following species of wood bees are also represented:
- Xylocopa cantabrita
- Xylocopa amedaei
- Xylocopa gracilis
- Xylocopa olivieri
- Xylocopa uclesiensis
Interesting to know:
Some of these “non-German” species of wood bees show for ours eye a more typical bee appearance. The Xylocopa cantabrita and the ylocopa olivieri, for example, have an almost black and yellow striped color like the honey bees instead of a metallic black. However, the striped drawing is usually not as pronounced and the colors merge a little more into the brownish-reddish tinge. Their physique is also corpulent like a wood bee and large with a length of about 18 to 22 millimeters.
The Xylocopa cantabrita occurs mainly on the Spanish peninsula and is therefore also commonly known as the Spanish wooden bee.
Situation of the wood bees with us
The question of how things are with us about the wooden bees is of course justified in times of ever more urgent species protection. In view of the general decline in plant and animal species diversity, we are also taking a closer look at the situation of wood bees.
The matter is actually double-edged. On the one hand, the wood bee is one of the endangered, endangered species in this country. In particular, the large wooden bee, which occurs most frequently in our regions, is on the so-called red list of the Federal Agency for Nature Conservation. So it has long been under careful observation.
The decline in local wood bee species is mainly due to the lack of suitable habitat. As we have already learned, wood bees prefer dead wood to create their nesting passages. The many overly tidy gardens in this country, however, offer little of it and in the agricultural and forestry sector, more and more space is no longer left to chance or chance. left to nature. Deadwood that is simply left lying around is rather a rarity, but an important livelihood for wood bees and many other small animal species.
On the other hand, a certain renewed distribution of the species can be observed: because the summers are getting hotter and As the winters become increasingly mild, heat-loving insect species invade the wood bees further and further north before. Despite their increased occurrence in the southern parts of the country, you may also spot one or the other wooden bees in northern German areas such as Brandenburg, North Rhine-Westphalia or Lower Saxony.
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frequently asked Questions
Can wooden bees be dangerous?
In view of their size, their mysterious black color and their loud hum, wooden bees do not seem entirely kosher to many a garden owner. Of course, also because the sight of them is even more rare and almost a bit more exotic.
In general, wood bees belong to the less dangerous genera within the family of real bees. This is due to their solitary, i.e. solitary, way of life. Solitary stinging insects generally have less reason to sting because the defense of a state is no longer necessary. Species that live socially, i.e. that form large colonies, such as German wasps, Hornets or honey bees have to protect an entire colony in order to preserve the species and thus simply have more surface to attack.
Solitary species such as wood bees, on the other hand, are only dependent on their sting when they are attacked as individuals, for example on foraging foraging. That is why it is very rare that they sting. The secretion in their sting is also no more poisonous than that of honeybees. To avoid a sting, you should leave a wooden bee alone as much as possible and not press it.
Are wooden bees protected or endangered?
According to the Federal Nature Conservation Act, the large wooden bee has the status of "specially protected" in Germany. Harming, catching or killing wooden bees is therefore prohibited and will be prosecuted.
So approach the animals carefully! Instead of driving them away, you'd better create the living conditions that are increasingly becoming available to them in the wild can be taken by designing your garden close to nature, leaving dead wood and, if necessary, a nesting aid build.