chamber, in a series within the tunnel. The eggs hatch in two to three days. The larvae develop in approximately two weeks. The prepupal (nonfeeding larvae) and pupal stages take about three to four weeks to reach adulthood. Teneral (adult shortly after emergence, when it is not entirely hardened or not of the mature color) females are fed by the mother. They are capable of buzzing in about a week, and of flight in approximately two to three weeks. A single female in a tunnel may be joined later by her offspring or other bees. Only one female will collect pollen, prepare cells, and lay eggs, however. Other females perform guard and nest-cleaning duties. Pollination Flowers are the sole source of food and water for these bees, which have a pattern of visiting certain plants at various times throughout the day, and provide pollen for the females to feed their brood. To collect pollen from most flowers, females gather pollen on their hindlegs through contact with the exposed anthers, but in flowers such as Solanaceae with closed anthers, they can use buzz pollination, by which the pollen is released from anther following vibration of the indirect flight muscles of the bee. The foraging behavior of X. sonorina involves a quick series of movements between flowers. In a 1996 study using Asystasia gangetica (Chinese violet), X. sonorina visited 16 flowers per minute and spent an average of 1.5 seconds at each flower, usually flying towards the flower from the front, landing on the petals, and moving to the bottom of the corolla. Another study found that X. sonorina was a primary and secondary nectar "robber" of A. gangetica since it "took nectar through perforations and did not contact stigmas in doing so." Floral robbery occurs when the carpenter bee makes perforations near the base of the tubular corolla of the flower to obtain nectar, but does not pollinate the flower in return, when visiting flowers that are so deep they cannot reach the nectar with their tonques. Some flowers protect themselves from robbery with adaptive structures such as strong plant walls or by producing extrafloral nectar which is visited by ants that inhibit the bees from robbing the nectar, though ant guards are only effective against certain bee species (not Xylocopa). In Hawaii and Niue Island, X. sonorina has been used in tropical agriculture as a pollinator of Passiflora edulis, a