- #1
somegrue
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- TL;DR Summary
- Some sort of bee is crawling into holes in wooden furniture and eventually plugging them. What's going on? (With pictures.)
My apartment's balcony door is wide open more often than not. This time of year, that tends to mean that insects keep flying in and out. Most of them, or at least most of the ones that are large and/or loud enough for me to notice, are bee and wasp types. They behave quite differently from the bees and wasps I get later in the year - most strikingly, they totally ignore food, even when it's readily accessible, and instead seem to be interested in wood and fabric. My interpretation is that this is to do with nest-building or the like. A couple of years ago, one of them did indeed start building a nest inside the apartment, suspended below a wooden board. Fortunately, the nest was right in the open and I noticed and removed it before she got very far. That was a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_wasp, I think.
Some of the (furry) bee types seem to be particularly attracted to holes in wood, like those in the uprights of Lundia or Ikea's Ivar shelf systems. They carefully look for holes, investigate them, and if they decide they like them, start a routine alternating between doing something inside the hole and doing something else outside the apartment. Their flight paths get quite efficient, directly from the door to the hole, then directly back to the door, none of that buzzing around the room and across windows that they start with. They keep at this for hours and days on end, many times per hour. The end result is a plugged hole.
Pictures:
(The hole above the one in progress is already plugged. Sorry the quality isn't better, there's something in the way that's real tricky to move, so the camera is at a bit of an awkward angle and it's too dark to do without the flash.)
My uneducated guess is that behind the plug, there's an egg and some food, and that gathering that supply, and whatever the plug is made of, is why they need to do all that flying back and forth.
Does that seem likely? If so, does that mean that these are non-social bees of some sort - or maybe not bees at all, despite the furriness? (I'm in Germany, in case that narrows it down.) If not, what might be going on instead?
Last but nowhere near least, Is there any practical reason to worry about and so try and stop them doing this, like there very clearly was for the paper wasp nest?
Thanks for any insights! :)
Some of the (furry) bee types seem to be particularly attracted to holes in wood, like those in the uprights of Lundia or Ikea's Ivar shelf systems. They carefully look for holes, investigate them, and if they decide they like them, start a routine alternating between doing something inside the hole and doing something else outside the apartment. Their flight paths get quite efficient, directly from the door to the hole, then directly back to the door, none of that buzzing around the room and across windows that they start with. They keep at this for hours and days on end, many times per hour. The end result is a plugged hole.
Pictures:
(The hole above the one in progress is already plugged. Sorry the quality isn't better, there's something in the way that's real tricky to move, so the camera is at a bit of an awkward angle and it's too dark to do without the flash.)
My uneducated guess is that behind the plug, there's an egg and some food, and that gathering that supply, and whatever the plug is made of, is why they need to do all that flying back and forth.
Does that seem likely? If so, does that mean that these are non-social bees of some sort - or maybe not bees at all, despite the furriness? (I'm in Germany, in case that narrows it down.) If not, what might be going on instead?
Last but nowhere near least, Is there any practical reason to worry about and so try and stop them doing this, like there very clearly was for the paper wasp nest?
Thanks for any insights! :)
