Carpenter Bees

Great God's Trousers! The Wood Bees Are Back! That's right, wooden fences, fascia boards and any unpainted outside wood structures beware. The large bees that seem to make a perfect round hole in your fence post,  leaving a pile of saw dust behind,  are back to make your life a living hell. I hate these bees, better known as carpenter bees or more properly, Xylocopa virginica.

These carpenter bees can cause a substantial amount of damage for their size, unlike the other wood destroying pest, termites, these bees do not eat the wood. They burrow or drill into the wood and make a right turn. Now multiply this tunnel by many years and many offspring later, and you can see that the damage can be big.

So the next questions would be just how do you get rid of these rotten stinkin flying wood wreckers, and are they in the carpenter union? Well, you can exclude them or try to mechanically keep them out via painting wood surfaces outside with a heavy latex type paint. Even then sometimes they drill. You can use pesticides, this can be dangerous if you don't know what you are doing, so maybe call a professional, lastly...buy plastic!

No doubt carpenter bees are a pain...and if you catch them during their season you may have some success at getting rid of them over time, but this all depends on the seasons. This year in Pennsylvania they emerged early...in March...due to a very warm winter and an unusually warm month of March. Their 2 seasons are spring and late summer, around August.

So, if you are unlucky enough to have these bees using your home for a breeding ground, you can do what I do, grab a tennis racket and swat the living bageesus out of them, call a pro, or try to do it yourself. Either way, be very careful.