How To Get Rid of Carpenter Bees
Carpenter Bees are the aggressive, over-sized bees that swarm you, dive-bomb you, but will never sting you. They’re harmless to you (mostly) but can wreak havoc on your home. The female carpenter bee does have a stinger, but will rarely use it, while the male bee doesn’t have the ability to sting. They come out in the spring as temperatures begin to climb. Trust me, you’ll know if you have them. We’ve had a huge problem with them and I posted on Instagram asking for suggestions, only to be met with many of you who also have problems with these same pesky bugs. So I did some research and wanted to share.
What Are Carpenter Bees
Before you begin to eradicate them, be sure they are in fact carpenter bees. They are large, black bees that you’d see hovering around the outside of you homes. They are “named for their habit of excavating holes in wood, in order to rear their young.”
They love burrowing in all kinds of wood, specifically:
unpainted wood
weathered wood,
softer varieties such as redwood
cedar
cypress
pine
You will most likely find them nesting in the rafters, fascia boards, siding, wooden shake roofs, decks and outdoor furniture. For us, they swarm our all wood deck and pergola. Carpenter bees are known for coming back year after year and burrowing in the holes they’ve already created, to the point that these holes grow so big they compromise the structure.
How To Know If You Have Carpenter Bees
We knew instantly that carpenter bees were an issue when sawdust fall on my head while working on our back deck. As they borrow into the wood, they leave small openings and dust around the holes. Look for:
1/2- to 3/4-inch circular openings in wood
Sawdust or wood shavings around or near those openings
A yellow substance near or just inside the entrance
Threatening flight activity around the area, which is usually males defending the territory (seriously they are mean)
Tips For Getting Rid Of Carpenter Bees
Carpenter bees are not very social and do not live in hives like bumblebees so it can be difficult to get rid of them all at once. There are many insecticides that you can spray that may help, although these are better use at prevention before you have an issue. We also worried about spraying anything that could be harmful to our garden, plants, or dogs. That severely limited the number of solutions we could try.
What Worked For Us
We tried several things before finding our winning solution. What we found works the best is to buy a carpenter bee trap. They’re a little expensive, but much less expensive than hiring a professional to take care of it. We used this one from Lowe’s and caught 8 bees in the first day. Here is a similar trap available on Amazon. You just nail it into a place where you’ve seen a lot of bee activity. For us, that was our deck. There is a hole the exact size the bees drill and they go into it, thinking there will be space for them to burrow inside. Instead they are trapped in the plastic box and eventually die.
In the holes that the bees had already. created, we sprayed a little household cleaner inside. You can use water or that insecticide we talked about earlier. This basically drives the bees out of the holes. It will kill those left behind as well. They breathe through their exoskeleton and even soapy water will suffocate them. Then we hammered 3/8-inch dowel rods into the holes. The bees make perfect 3/8-inch holes when they borrow so these rods should fit perfectly. You can even add some wood glue to the end of the rod and stick it directly in the hole without encouraging the bees to leave. Eventually, they will suffocate inside the hole and die.
While you’re doing this they may get mad. This is the only time when a female may sting you, but we have yet to be stung and have made them mad several times. I do suggest wearing protective eyeglasses in case they fly out suddenly and gloves just in case.
Hope this works for you! Let me know if it does! Links below.