Carpenter bees resemble huge bumble bees, and are excellent pollinators. They are active mostly during the month of May in this part of the country. Unlike most bees, they can hover in one spot like a helicopter. They emerge from winter dormancy in late April. The males and females fly around doing their mating flights. If there are a lot of them present, it can be a terrifying sight to the uninformed. However, the males do not possess a stinger and while the females do, they almost never sting. They are about as harmless as a bee with a stinger can be. Once they mate the males die and the females go about drilling their holes. The holes are typically 1/2” in diameter. They prefer to tunnel into unpainted wood, but will tunnel into painted or stained wood. They will drill into fence posts, any untreated beams in houses, decks, etc.. They also get behind the trim boards along the roof line of a house and drill holes from the back side of these boards. They drill into the wood about half way and then turn at right angles and drill a tunnel 6-8” long. Their activity is usually first noticed by piles of sawdust on a roof under the drilling activity or on the ground or by their fan shaped droppings stains beneath the drilled holes. Once the female lays an egg, she provides it with “bee bread” (a mixture of pollen and nectar). She then seals the egg in a chamber with wood pulp and proceeds to do the same with the next egg, until she has deposited about 6-8 eggs in the tunnel. This can cause quite a problem at times, because woodpeckers can start pecking holes from the outside, looking for the larvae in the tunnels to feed on. After she finishes her egg laying, usually in very early June she dies. This is why the activity is seen mostly in May. The young emerge later in the summer and spend the rest of the season feeding on nectar in flowers. There is only one reproductive cycle per year. The young sometimes return to the tunnels they were born in to spend the winter. Unless there is a serious infestation over several years, the damage is usually just cosmetic. They never tunnel all the way through and get into the house or attic.
The best way to solve the problem, is to replace the boards they are drilling into with a composite decking material. One Brand name is "Azek". They will not drill into that. Another method is to physically exclude them from the areas they drill in by stuffing fencing, steel wool, or some similar material up behind the trim board thereby limiting their ability to get behind the boards.
In the photo, the dropping stains can be seen on the clapboard siding. The holes in the trim board are those made by woodpeckers, looking for the nice juicy larva in the tunnels in the trim board.
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| Typical Carpenter bee damage |
Nice Post!
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