It was a dark and cloudy afternoon and the rain was threatening to start at any moment (and eventually did). Even my usual grasshoppers and spiders seemed to have disappeared from sight. I was losing hope that I would find anything interesting to photograph when I stumbled upon a large bee on a bright yellow plant.
It looked like a carpenter bee, but the eyes were unusually light in color. I am pretty sure that it is an Eastern Carpenter bee (Xylocopa virginica) and the white patch on the face indicates that it is a male. There are other photos on-line of carpenter bees with green eyes, but I am not sure how common it is to find one like this. I don’t recall ever seeing one like it before.
Male Eastern Carpenter bee
© Michael Q. Powell. All rights reserved.
Mike Powell 
Nice Shot!
Thanks. I keep coming across “interesting” insects and manage to get decent shots of many of them. Who knew there were so many different one?
[…] I discovered that I had seen a similar bee in October 2012 and published a posting entitled “Green-eyed Eastern Carpenter bee.” Wow. It’s been a long time between sightings, so maybe I can be forgiven for having […]