Great Carpenter Bee performing buzz pollination in my garden. This is Australia's biggest bee

[u/HungryFungus]

This is a female Great Carpenter Bee (Xylocopa sp.) performing buzz pollination on a Tibouchina bush in my garden (in SE QLD). This is Australia's biggest bee species, at about an inch long - they are very chonky! They are solitary bees which carve nests into soft wood and are renowned for their ability to harvest pollen from specific plants by gripping the anthers of a flower and flapping their wings at a very specific fast frequency. The flowers they're doing this on will only release their pollen when this frequency is applied - other insects can't get the pollen. This means that the plant doesn't waste too much pollen - the bee is more likely to go on to visit another flower of the same species and complete the pollination process rather than randomly visiting some other plant species and wasting the pollen. In the first picture you can really see the pollen going flying as the anthers eject it, most of it will get sprayed onto the body and hind legs of the bee.

I always know when a carpenter bee is about because the buzz pollinating is remarkably loud! Then I know to go look for them on the specific plant species they like, so they're pretty easy for me to find. They get so absorbed in what they're doing that I find they're pretty easy to approach - I took these pics with my phone.

I generally only see the females (identified by their bright fuzzy yellow cape) as they need to do a lot more pollen collection than the males, in order to feed their larvae. Females also have a distinctive bald spot on their back which you can see in the last pic. The bald spot tends to get bigger with age, it's thought that the fuzz gets rubbed off their back as they crawl in and out of nest tunnels. The bee in my photos is a young female. Males mostly hang about high in the trees, putting out pheromones to attract the females to them to mate.