The Carpenter Bee Is Aptly Named As Many Homeowners Soon Find Out

It’s a beautiful early summer morning and you walk outside. Bang! Something just banged into the side of your head. All you see is this big shiny black bee bumbling around your garden. Next thing you know you start seeing piles of sawdust around your shed.

Well my friend you have discovered the carpenter bee. Don’t worry, it’s not going to hurt you, but it might make some bee sized holes in anything made from wood on your property. Read on to find out how to distract it from turning your home into sawdust.

What is a Carpenter Bee?

Carpenter bees (genus Xylocopa) are the largest native bees in the United States, so you can’t miss one. There are nearly 500 species of carpenter bees and nearly all species burrow into hard plant material such as dead wood.

Don’t confuse them with bumblebees, who mostly just wander around your garden pollinating plants. Most carpenter bees have a shiny abdomen, whereas bumblebee abdomens are completely covered with dense hair. Though they are solitary bees, once you have found a place they like you will find many more coming to your home.

You will hear them before you see them at times. It will sound like a mini saw working away at wood. If you see particles of dust in the air, you’ve found the carpenter bee. They vibrate their bodies as they scrape their teeth against wood. Unlike termites, carpenter bees do not eat wood; they discard the bits of wood, or reuse particles to build partitions between cells, leaving you with a pile of dust and yellow poop and spit.

Each nest has a single entrance which may have a network of tunnels. The entrance is often a perfectly circular hole measuring about 0.6 inches on the underside of a beam, bench, or tree limb. The tunnel functions as a nursery for babies. Females also store balls of pollen, known as bee bread, in there to feed their young.

She lays a single egg on the food mass, then seals the cavity, or brood cell, with a mixture of wood pulp and saliva. She repeats this process, filling the tunnel with a line of brood cells, each about an inch long.

Over the summer, bee larvae hatch in their nest cell and feed on the stored pollen and nectar. After the larva finishes feeding, it enters the pupal stage during which it transforms into an adult. In late summer, the new adults emerge from the nest.

Carpenter bees are long lived, up to three years and there can be one or two generations per year. Often newly hatched daughters, live together in their nest with their mother.

Carpenter bees have short mouthparts and are important pollinators and can even be obligate pollinators for the maypop (Passiflora incarnata) and Orphium, which are not pollinated by any other insects. On flowers such as salvias, penstemons, and other long, tubular flowers the carpenter bee, due to its large size, is unable to enter the flower opening. Instead they become nectar robbers. Using their mouthparts they cut a slit at the base of corolla and steal away with the nectar without having pollinated the flower.

Are Carpenter Bees Dangerous?

In no way are carpenter bees dangerous unless you pick up a female and try to smash it in your fingers. Please don’t do that.

Male bees often are seen hovering near nests and will approach nearby animals. However, males are harmless, since they do not have a stinger. Male bees will often nosedive at anything that could get in their way of mating, so you will often find them banging into you if you get in they way of them and their next date. See, people and bugs aren’t so different after all.

Female carpenter bees are capable of stinging, but they are docile and rarely sting unless caught in the hand or otherwise directly provoked.

The problem is they can damage your home or shed. A few species bore holes in wood dwellings, chewing out burrows with their robust mandibles. Since the tunnels are near the surface, structural damage is generally minor or superficial. However, carpenter bee nests are attractive to woodpeckers, which may do further damage by drilling into the wood to feed on the bees or larvae. We share a few helpful solutions below.

*Common view of a Carpenter bee, usually you’ll see its but poking out.*

How Do I Control Carpenter Bees?

Female carpenter bees are attracted to raw, unfinished wood, or stained, weathered wood when searching for a nest site. Well maintained, painted wood is rarely attacked.

Nail holes, splinters, and cracks in the face of the wood surface are inviting because they offer the bee a head start into the wood. Shingles, siding, decks, picnic tables, doors, sills, soffits, fascia, and fence posts are all popular nest sites, particularly when located near gardens and flower beds where the bees feed.

Although the nest of a single bee will not cause structural damage, multiple tunnels from numerous bees and tunnels that are reused and expanded over several years may weaken wood.

We only advocate for pesticides as a last resort, so try the steps below first, as you may also kill other pollinators with pesticides.

Prevention

Prevention is the best approach to deter carpenter bees. By maintaining sound, finished wood surfaces, bees can be prevented from establishing nests around your home.

Painted surfaces are unattractive to nesting bees.
Nail holes and cracks should be filled with caulk or putty before painting.
Non-wood surfaces and coatings, such as vinyl or aluminum siding will exclude carpenter bees entirely.
Unpainted or stained cedar, cypress and redwood shingles and siding are also attacked despite their pest-resistant reputations.

In April or May, the female carpenter bee searches for good nest sites. She will reuse and expand an existing nest tunnel or bore her own. So, in the late summer and early fall of each year you should check for perfectly round 1/2 inch holes in wood around your home.

You can clean them out and fill them in to reduce the chance of additional infestation. Each year they come back to the same holes and expand them, with records of 10 foot long tunnels, so the longer you let them go, the more challenging they are to control.

The best times to treat and repair damaged wood and minimize the killing of these pollinators would be late summer (after the summer emergence and before hibernation) or early spring before nest building begins. Carpenter bees are usually searching for nest sites in April-May.

Trap Wood

Another option, known as trap wood, is providing a piece of inexpensive, unpainted wood near known nest sites, making sure that this trap wood is oriented in the same direction as structural wood. Bees that nest in this wood instead will not cause damage to your home and can be eliminated by carefully removing, destroying, or treating the wood. You can start by placing the wood near a nest and slowly moving the wood away. They when it’s nesting season you can drive that nest far far away.

Bee Traps

You can purchase a carpenter bee trap—a wooden box with 1/2-inch holes with a glass bottle attached to the bottom. The trap should be hung near a spot where you see activity. The bees enter the holes and are attracted by the light from the glass bottle where they get trapped. You can then relocate the bees or allow them to die.

Essential Oils

A mixture of lavender, tea tree, jojoba, and citronella oil can be sprayed around nesting areas to deter bees. You can also spray on any wood that is impacted or you think will be, as the wood will absorb the scent. Citrus oils, such as orange, lemon, and lime, are also effective due to carpenter bees' aversion to their scent.

Apply to areas where bees are nesting or are likely to nest, such as eaves, fascia boards, decks, and wooden furniture.

Be Loud

If you’ve wondered if there’s any benefit of agreeing to host your kid’s rock band, here’s one. Carpenter bees enjoy the quiet so if you find yourself with some unwanted guests, set up a radio or speaker right next to or on top of where the nest is. Not only does the music disorient them, the vibrations will cause them to evacuate their nest.