We live in a log house, and these damn spawns of Satan try to make Swiss cheese of it each year.
I finally had enough of their shit. So over the weekend I managed to nab 30 of them using a butterfly net, and then crushed each using my boot. I’m hoping this will make some kind of difference. Fuckers.
I hate those bastards. When I’m sitting on the porch I always make sure to have my bee-bat (a piece of 1x6 that I shaped kind of like a cricket bat) handy.
Butterfly net? Cool! Gonna give it a try. I’ve read ways to chemically treat their bore holes, but never tried. We have them around the barn and they are a PIA.
Well, male carpenter bees don’t have stingers. Females do, and can sting a human, but seldom do sting; they have a reputation for being docile.
They only drill one hole a year, and they tend to drill them near the previous hole, instead of spreading out, so the damage is localized. And as Wikipedia says,
The damage they’re doing is just cosmetic. And they either can’t fight back (males) or are friendly (females). There’s not really any need to kill them at all.
Our soffits have *dozens *of holes. And I find it difficult to contain my anger when I step out on the front porch in the morning to find a pile of sawdust under one of the porch’s horizontal support beams. :mad:
Anything that drills a hole in my house is going to die.
I never remember seeing carpenter bees growing up. Now they’re everywhere. And they’re super aggressive. They go after each other with a vengeance, not to mention the poor birds!
I don’t kill them, however. They were so happy to see my annuals, that I had mercy on their little insect hearts.
This is not true. I have been fighting them in a similar way to Crafter_Man, although my weapon of choice is a small-mesh fishing net with a four-foot handle. Last summer I scabbed some two-by-fours onto the existing rafters of my garage to prepare for a new metal roof, and I found burrows that extended quite deep into the wood. By this I mean that the burrow extended more than halfway into the 3 1/2 inch depth, and extended several inches length-wise as well. A couple of the rafters were so riddled that I didn’t feel they were strong enough to scab onto, so I cut off the damaged part and extended the new part several feet into the garage to find solid wood. I was able to break one of those removed pieces across my knee. It was considerably lighter than it should have been, and was definitely structurally weakened.
Have you tried wasp spray? They come to our house every year and I have no problem with them. They’re friendly; that’s why they come close!
But Mig does not like them, so he sits on the back steps spraying them with Raid wasp spray a few times early on and we have no more after that.