does anyone know what to spray for these or what to do to them before they destroy my shed? I use to spray Lindane but they took it, like everything else that works good off the market. [img]/forums/images/icons/confused.gif[/img]
does anyone know what to spray for these or what to do to them before they destroy my shed? I use to spray Lindane but they took it, like everything else that works good off the market. [img]/forums/images/icons/confused.gif[/img]
tbolt, If you google on "carpenter bee insecticide" you'll get several good hits.
In the mean time here is a list of things you could do without having to google.
Paint all the exterior wood. They don't burrow through good paint.
Spray the wood with permethrin, available at the Ag supply store in various sizes of container. I buy Duravet which is 10% permethrin and have paid from 40-60 bucks a gal.
Extra benefit: you dilute the permethrin to 1/2 of a percent and it is the same thing you can buy at Wally World for about 5 bucks for a few oz in an aerosol can. WAY CHEAPER my way. It is used to treat outer wear (cotton or cotton blend) and socks and it stops ticks dead, literally but has low toxicity for people. This is the DoD method our troops used before they started to issue BDU made from pretreated cloth so the troops didn't have to do it themselves.
You can cover all exposed unpainted wood with screen material.
You can ride shotgun on your wood and kill the buggers. Only the females are equipped wth stingers but rarely if ever sting anyone.
Even WD-40 THE ELIXIR OF RURAL LIFE sprayed in the hole she is making will do the deed. The female does the tunneling while mostly the males just hang out looking for females and have no stinger so they don't count.
Carpenter bee damage is more cosmetic than structural but I don't like them making holes so tend to react vigorously when I detect them.
Bug season is upon us. I killed a wasp in the room here while writing this and Japanese beatles and or lady bugs are showing up out of the nooks and cranies and dying by the dozens around the house. I haven't bothered to Id them and from 6 ft away a dead Japanese beatle or a dead lady bug look about the same to me.
[img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img] Pat [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img]
"I'm not from your planet, monkey boy!"
I play recreational ice hockey and my hand -eye coordination has improved considerably since I began swatting carpenter bees out of the air with an old hockey stick. I've gotten so good at that there were are less and less bees each year for the last three years. One could use a tennis racquet, golf club, or any other thing that one plays with.
jr, Great sport no doubt(swatting bees) but probably not the only reason for the dwindling number of bees since the ones buzzing around the most are males who don't burrow. The females burrow and attract males to their burrows. The males hang out hoping to be the one picked. Most of the ones you swat don't end up contributing to the population and as males don't burrow they don't destroy anything. There is good news. Although females are equipped with stingers, they seem to never sting anyone, at least that I know of.
I once used the wasp and hornet stream spray can as an antiaircraft gun to shoot down 21 bumble bees as they flew into and our of a hole in a rotted out screen cover over an attic vent. It was a frantic 15-20 minutes with lots of running up and down the ladder depending on the aggression and number of bees in the melee at any given time. I nearly escaped unscathed but when climbing the ladder I shoved my hand down on a dead bee and injected myself in the palm. Oh well, another lesson learned.
Wasn't it a 007 movie where a guy was using a tennis racket to fend off bats trying to get into his room, in Cairo I believe.
Wanna develop great hand eye coordination? Do the "Karate Kid" thing and catch the bees with chopsticks!
[img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img] [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img] Pat [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img] [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img]
"I'm not from your planet, monkey boy!"
There were a couple of good threads aboutr carpenter bees over on TractorByNet.com.
Here are the links:
Carpenter Bees Thread #1
Plus another thread has some posts about carpenter bees towards the end:
Thread #2
Hakim Chishti
Staff/Moderator
An update to this topic from my little place...
We have a large wood deck that runs all the way around our house. Needless to say, the carpenter bees loved our place. After several tennis racquet sessions, I finally came to the conclusion I needed to really get rid of these pests.
I caulked in all their holes. For some reason, they do not try to get out, they just stay in there and eventually die. Then, I sprayed the wood areas with some Bayer Termite and Carpenter Ant Spray that I bought from Lowes. There happened to be a pesticide vendor stocking the aisle, so I talked to him about it, and he said that stuff would do the job even though it doesn't say it is for carpenter bees (or "wood bees" as I call them).
I am happy to say that since I did all this, we are wood bee free. The males hung around for a couple of hours after the holes were caulked up, but they soon left. Kinda like guys going out to bars - if there are no females around they don't stay there very long.
It's been a week, and I have not seen one wood bee since the day I did all this. So I'm calling it a success as of now.
*** What we've got here is failure to communicate ***
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote