How To Get Rid Of Bumble Bees In Your Yard – Like all bees, carpenter bees are valuable to our ecosystem and are incredibly efficient pollinators. But unlike other bees, they can be noisy, messy and a nuisance around your home and garden if they start boring into wood and causing damage. Here’s what you need to know about carpenter bees, how they work, and what you need to do to get rid of them for good (without resorting to toxic chemicals).

The humble bee is an essential part of the many miniature ecosystems that make it possible for nature’s wheels and gears to keep turning and the world to keep going. Take the bee out of the global equation and the effect on humanity and every other living organism on earth would be catastrophic.

How To Get Rid Of Bumble Bees In Your Yard

We need bees far more than they will ever need us, but as much as we rely on them, some bee species have unique nesting and mating behavior that can be a nuisance in the yard.

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Carpenter bees are wood-boring insects that burrow into wood to make their nests. As solitary insects, they do not live in hives and are not part of a complex social group (like bees).

They are one of the largest native bee species in the United States (a distinction they share with bumblebees) and are often mistaken for bumblebees. But while both are large in size (about 1/2 to 1 inch long), their appearance is quite different.

The carpenter bee is less hairy than a bumblebee. It has a shiny black abdomen, a fuzzy yellow thorax with a bald spot in the middle of the back, and a black head. The male has a white spot on his face.

Although they don’t conform to the same social structure that most bee species do, carpenter bees still follow the same hierarchical structure, with the female always taking charge.

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The female of the species is not defensive or aggressive, but may sting if provoked. Its job is to excavate small tunnels in wood to lay its eggs and raise the larvae to adulthood.

The male, on the other hand, is very aggressive, but they all talk and don’t bite – that is, they can attack a potential threat (such as other bees, insects, and even humans), but they can’t sting. His job is to guard the entrance to the tunnels (hoping to catch a mate).

Carpenter bees aren’t particularly fussy about where they nest, which means that when spring is in the air and mating season arrives, there’s a pretty good chance that a persistent carpenter bee will choose to nest in -a rather inconvenient place – such as the wood around your house.

But they chew wood (and spit the particles back out) to build their nesting chambers, an activity that can be noisy, messy and a nuisance on your property.

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The easiest way to tell if you’ve been visited by carpenter bees is if you start seeing small, random piles of sawdust or loose shavings around wooden surfaces outside your home – especially sawdust near or directly under holes small.

You might hear a muffled buzzing inside the forest (as the bees made their tunnels) and you might even see some large, slightly blurry bees flying around the wooden eaves, wooden fence or deck wooden.

Those little mounds of sawdust are byproducts of bee browsing. And where there is sawdust, there will almost certainly be holes.

To tell if these are just random holes or the skilled work of carpenter bees, look for sticky, dark, yellowish-brown or black spots around the holes; these are bee droppings (excrement).

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The holes are about 1/2 inch in diameter and perfectly round, so you can even mistake them for holes drilled by a power tool.

Carpenter bees prefer to bore into unstained hardwoods such as pine, cypress, fir, cedar and redwood. (Although some species will also bore into hardwoods such as oak or eucalyptus.)

Their holes are commonly found in wood roof shingles, fascia boards, eaves, rafters, siding, decks and railings, fence posts, firewood and outdoor furniture. In the wild, they often make nests in dead trees, stumps and logs.

From the outside, carpenter bee damage looks like a simple hole. But the hole is only an entrance to a network of branching tunnels built by several bees.

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The female carpenter bee begins by using her mandible (mouthpiece) to vibrate against the grain of the wood, carving out small granules that resemble sawdust. It goes about half an inch into the wood, then makes a 90-degree turn and “drills” a long tunnel following the grain of the wood. A single tunnel is usually about 6 inches long, but can stretch up to 12 inches.

The female can bore a little over half an inch of wood per week and sometimes you can even hear her furiously chewing through the wood.

A hole can be used by several nesting females, each bee having her own tunnel branching from the main one. Inside each tunnel are 6 to 10 cells. The female mixes pollen and nectar to form a sort of “bee bread”, lays an egg on top of the bee bread, then seals each cell with chewed wood.

Because the female likes to keep a clean nest, she pushes all the excess wood pellets and her own excrement out of the tunnel, resulting in piles of sawdust and sticky brown streaks you see outside the holes.

The Undertaker Bees

On its own, a single tunnel bored by a carpenter bee may not cause significant damage to your house or other wooden structure. The initial drilling may not be aesthetically pleasing, but will not compromise stability.

However, female woodpeckers prefer to use the same nest sites as their mothers and may return to their nests to overwinter before enlarging and expanding the tunnels the following spring.

If the same tunnel is used by several carpenter bees over several years, it can stretch up to 10 feet in length, severely weakening the wood.

Woodpeckers also like to feed on carpenter bee larvae and will cause additional damage by tearing up wood to get to the nests.

How To Get Rid Of Bees Safely

So it’s always a good idea to stop carpenter bees as soon as you notice them burrowing on your property.

Carpenter bees are incredibly efficient pollinators and are a vital part of your garden’s ecosystem, and as long as they are left alone they pose absolutely no danger to you.

Once they’re buried, it’s too late to do anything to keep the bees there. You will have to leave them alone and take care of what is left of their nests after the next generation of bees has hatched and grown.

Therefore, the best way to get rid of carpenter bees is to prevent them from settling in the first place. The following methods I recommend for their control are non-toxic and safe to use around children and pets.

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Attempting to deal with a bee infestation using pesticides, insecticides or toxic chemicals should be a last resort and avoided if possible.

This is not only to help the pollinator population in your yard, but also for health and environmental reasons.

It sounds crazy, but the simple truth is that if you paint your fences, decks, and any other buildings and wooden surfaces where carpenter bees might be tempted to nest, they will move elsewhere.

Why? Because carpenter bees are put off by wood that has been chemically treated (which makes it more difficult to bury).

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Painting is such a simple solution and works so well that it is always my #1 recommendation for deterring bee nest building.

Another tip: If you’re building a new structure or replacing any old or damaged wood, use pressure-treated lumber instead of untreated lumber. Or, consider synthetic materials like vinyl, Trex, or HardiePlank if you don’t want the ongoing maintenance of paint.

Many insects are sensitive to the strong scent of citrus essential oil, including carpenter bees. The strong scents of orange, lemon, lime, lemongrass, bergamot and grapefruit are strong enough to deter them, but safe enough to use in your home as a natural bee repellent.

Using citrus as a deterrent can be laborious (especially if you spray with citrus a few times a season), so I recommend this method only in tandem with other preventative measures.

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Hanging heavy wind chimes (or anything that will vibrate and make noise when caught in the breeze) in areas where carpenter bees might be nesting can be effective enough to drive them away.

Similarly, you can even install outdoor speakers around potential problem areas (as long as you remember to turn them on often). The vibration from the sounds coming out of the speakers is enough to disorient the bees and either discourage them from nesting or drive them away from their nests entirely.

So put on the outdoor sound system you’ve always wanted and load up your favorite playlists or podcasts!

Disclosure: All products on this page are independently selected. If you buy from one of my links, I may earn a commission. Method #4: Seal the holes.

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Each new generation of carpenter bees hatches in late summer. Bees come out of their nests in August and September to forage

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