Bee-have!!!

Disclaimer:  Yes, I know that ALL bees are pollinators and we really shouldn't kill bees, however, when they are chewing up my house, all environmental considerations are off!

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I'm spending a lot of time lately on our front porch.  Not lounging around drinking wine spritzers (well, maybe a LITTLE).  I’ve been working on carpenter bee damage off and on for over ten years,  and I’m finally making headway.

We made a major addition to the house, including adding a big front porch, twenty-six years ago.  It held up pretty well for a long time, but about ten to twelve years ago, we had a problem with carpenter bees divebombing anyone who came up onto the porch.  They weren't really aggressive, but it's pretty disconcerting to have helicopter-sized bees buzzing around your head.

A typical bee hole.
They are perfectly pencil sized!

They had bored holes in the porch railings, and you could watch them arrive and depart all day long.  If it was quiet when you sat on the porch you could hear the little creeps munching on the wood.   I bought some bee spray and attacked them in their holes.

It worked - temporarily.

A couple of years later, they were back in force.  Ugh.

Since then, we've tried various approaches.

Spraying every year is a pain in the bee-hind, so that was abandoned fairly quickly.

The beginnings of a couple of holes.

Then That Man discovered carpenter bee traps!  They're basically a block of wood with a few inviting pencil-sized holes drilled into its sides at an upward angle.  There's a larger diameter hole drilled straight upward from the bottom of the block of wood that intercepts the smaller angled holes.  There's a Mason jar attached to the bottom of the block where the captives end up.  You empty it by unscrewing the jar and dumping out the dead bees.  We caught a lot of bees, but it seems that the traps, just like Japanese beetle traps, tend to attract even MORE bees to your vicinity.  Not good.

A couple of years ago, a family of pileated woodpeckers decided to tear up a portion of the porch railing.  They were going after the bees' larvae, and they threw chunks of wood all over the place.  To discourage this bee-havior, I put a metal baking sheet over the spot until I was able to repair the holes.

This is where the bee tunnels broke
through the railing.  The entry hole is
on the underside of the railing.

This year I read on a local neighborhood website that some people had tried a dummy hornet's nest to discourage carpenter bees because hornets and other wasps are their natural enemies.  So I stuffed a brown shopping bag per instructions I found online and hung it on the porch.  The carpenter bees just flew circles around it and when they tired of that, crept into their holes in the railings.  Good grief.

After all that, I was fed up.  Stick a fork in me; I'm done.

So the major household project this summer is repairing all the carpenter bee damage and staining the porch.  A big project, but I'm approaching it like eating an elephant - one bite at a time.

I bought a couple of cans of Spectracide Carpenter Bee and Yellow Jacket Killer.  It has a long thin tube to attach to the spray nozzle so you can get the spray up into the cavities.  I hunted for entry holes and sprayed like mad.  I've used up three cans, and they aren't small!


One of my friends gave me instructions on how to fill the holes so the bees wouldn't want to reenter - stuff steel wool into the holes as far and as tightly as possible, cover the openings with wood putty, sand it all smooth, then stain or paint.  I had been using a regular old pencil to stuff the steel wool into the holes, but for the bottom rail, there wasn’t enough clearance to get a normal-sized pencil, so I broke it in two, to make it short enough to fit.  A custom-made steel wool stuffing tool!


The problem is I keep finding more and more holes.  I’ll think I’ve found them all, but there will be more.  So frustrating!  Just when I'm SURE I have them all filled, I find another.  They aren't new; I've just missed them.  UGH. 

So I feel a bit like Sisyphus, continually rolling his boulder uphill, only to have it roll back down just before he neared the top, probably rolling OVER him on the way down!

I'm making progress, and I WILL get it done.  I swear it.

Think good thoughts while I'm sanding and staining during this weekend of sweltering mid- to high- 90s temperatures! FUN.

A comparison between before staining (left) and after (right).  A HUGE difference.