Old MySQL doesn't support utf8mb4

MySQL 5.5.3 introduced the charset utf8mb4, but I'm trying to use the connector with version 5.1.40, which does not support this. Unfortunately, since the server doesn't support the encoding, it falls back to its default, which is latin1 and since the connector doesn't use the charset returned in the resultsets, the strings created contains character encoding errors.

Since the server greeting contains the version, is it possible to fall back to utf8 (utf8mb3) on older releases?