05/15/2026
I am not a pest. The perfect circles cut from your rose leaves weren't made by a caterpillar, a beetle, or a disease.
They were cut by a bee. With her jaws. Standing on the leaf, she rotated her body and sliced a circle around herself — like a compass drawing a curve — then flew away with the piece.
She's a leafcutter bee. She's using the circles to wallpaper a nursery.
🐦 Each circle lines a brood cell inside a narrow cavity — a hollow stem, a beetle hole in wood, a gap in a fence post. She stacks the cells in a row, like a roll of coins. Round pieces form the caps. Oval pieces form the walls. Each cell gets a ball of pollen and nectar, then a single egg, then a leaf cap. Sealed. Done.
She carries pollen on her belly, not her legs — a brush of dense hair on her abdomen called a scopa. She's one of the most efficient pollinators in the eastern U.S. One leafcutter bee does the pollination work of roughly twenty honeybees.
She doesn't make honey. She doesn't live in a hive. She doesn't sting unless physically crushed between your skin and a hard surface. She's solitary. She builds alone. She provisions alone. She seals the nursery and leaves.
🌿 If you find circular holes in rose leaves:
- That's her signature — clean, precise, always at the leaf edge
- The plant is fine — leafcutter damage is cosmetic, not structural
- She's nesting within a few hundred feet of the cuts
The circles in the rose leaves aren't damage. They're building materials.
She cut them with her own jaws, carried them one at a time, and wallpapered a nursery you'll never find. 🌱
