Today I was sitting in my car in the driveway enjoying the AC for a few minutes. I happened to look at the front door. There is a long thin opening where the siding meets the concrete front steps. In the short time I watched 6 bees flew into the opening. I do not know anything about bees. They resembled the bees that pollinate the rhododendrons* in front of the house. They must have a hive behind the siding. I want to leave them alone; but I need to know if a hive can damage the foundation.
I never used the front door of my house.
The foundation is poured concrete and cinder block
Thank you for reading
*Large black and yellow. The bees have not been around since late June.
Sounds like carpenter bees. A bit bigger than your standard honey bee? Walk around your house, and pay close attention to the area beneath the bottom of your window sills. Do you see any yellowish streaks? If you do, you’ll see a hole about 1/4" in diameter where the streaks come from.
Carpenter ants eat wood. This won’t bother a stone or concrete foundation, but can weaken the wood that sits atop it. I’d call an exterminator.
I seriously doubt that any bees excavate their own hive spaces, they just occupy empty spaces that already exist. Do bees have any mechanical process for chewing?
True, carpenter bees do not eat wood. However, they bore into the wood to make their nests, so they cause structural damage. Directly beneath the entrance hole, you’ll see a mound of sawdust-like frass.
There are many ways to deal with carpenter bees. One simple and non-poisonous way is to simply mix up a small batch of wood putty and, just after sundown, use a putty knife to plug up the hole with putty. All the bees inside will die.
I said after sundown, because bees all go back inside at sundown. Unlike those tricky ol’ rodents, bees never build a backdoor. Once the front door is plugged, it’s all over.
they may attack people near there defending a hive.
pollenating insects are your friends. i have left hives alone out in lawn or garden and try to avoid the spot. i have left hives on structures alone; though at a point they may get aggressive to your normal nearby activity. you need to decide a tolerance level.
this solution can be a problem depending on the insect and where the nest actually is.
with a solitary insect it may work.
with a colony insect they may find another way out (which may be into your house). people have plugged holes to have them dig through interior walls or come through crevices.
If they’re honeybees (OP wasn’t very specific, other than calling these bees “large”), they might build nests, including honeycombs, inside the walls. It can get really hot inside the walls, and the wax combs might melt all over the wooden frame parts of the house. That could be a fire hazard.
Bees, of course, assign some workers to fan the nest to keep it cool. But if you fumigate, then you have all that wax with no bees to fan it. That’s when they start melting.
When I was building my garage they (plural) were going right down the line of the facia board. It was quite the invasion. So if “colony” is the wrong term then “down right neighborly” is the best way to describe them.
I had never heard of them before this and originally thought some neighborhood kids were playing with a drill. In exasperation I wacked the facia board with a hammer and to my surprise all these bees started coming out.
While carpenter bees are solitary, “neighborly” isn’t a bad description. The females of a mated pair often tend to drill out their nests near that of another carpenter bee pair. The perfectly round hole only goes in a short distance, then the bee turns 90 degrees and starts drilling out parallel to the surface of the wood. Because of this, the damage they do is often just cosmetic unless allowed to go on for a long time. They won’t threaten the structural integrity of thick beam, for instance. The usual fix is simply to stuff the hole with wood putty. I leave it to you as to whether you kill the bee or wait for them to vacate the nest. They don’t like painted wood, and will usually leave treated surfaces alone. They can riddle the hell out of redwood decks and fencing though.
BTW, if one flies at you and acts threatening, it’s probably the male, who guards the nest. He’s bluffing. Like all male bees, he can’t sting. The female can.
I will not kill the bees. I do not like to kill and I do not use any pesticides. The area where they are “hanging out” is behind a piece of the metal siding covering the house below the front door. Behind the siding is the original wood tongue and groove siding that was painted and the sill plate. I will plug the hole after sun down as suggested.
What will this do if they are honey bees? I googled pics of both honey and carpenter bees. I think the bees under the front door are carpenter; but . . .
Wood putty in the hole doesn’t always work because usually they can just bore another exit / entrance hole along the path or just beside the puttied up hole. They bore thru wood for a living. There may be several males and a single female in “the hole” so killing one just pisses the others off; and the female will sting and sting hard if it is threatened. Still most of the ones in your face will be male and harmless, so just take a tennis racket out and get some practice. Or you can spray the hole with a powder that dries the out, available at the hardware store.
Also look at pictures of bumblebees. You said black and yellow. I know some carpenter bees have some yellow on them, but the ones I’m familiar with are black, about an inch long, with shiny abdomens. The real tip off is holes getting drilled in wood somewhere, of course. If they are large, black and yellow and fuzzy looking, they could be bumblebees. Those don’t drill holes in wood or build hives. They nest in or on the ground.
If they actually are honeybees, you DO have a major problem if they get into your walls. For honeybees, contact a beekeeper and get them taken off your hands.
I can not see what the bees are doing except they hover for a few seconds at the bottom of the front door and then fly into the slot below the siding. Without ripping off the siding I will never know unless they are
carpenter bees and bore enough holes so that years from now the sill plate collapses or
honey bees and stop fanning their hive and the wax causes a fire or
bumble bees and . . .?
Today I watched them for a few minutes. One of them flew almost to the slot and hovered around as if it could not see the slot. It kept hovering until a couple of more bees came along and showed it the way in. They are so cute. I will put tape across the railing up to the front door and hang a sign “beware of the bees.”
I looked at picks of all three they really look like bumbles.
