You’ve heard of wood destroying insects like termites and carpenter ants before. Termites eat wood and will chew through it voraciously. Carpenter ants don’t eat the wood, but they will carve galleries inside of it. Both can pose severe structural damage to your home. Yet few people think of carpenter bees as a threat to their home. You need to get rid of carpenter bees when they get close to your house. They won’t cause the structural damage termites and ants can, but they will ruin roofs, flooring, furniture, and other elements of your home that are expensive to replace.
How Do You Recognize Carpenter Bees?
Bumble bees get their warm, fuzzy appearance from their rotund shape and little hairs all over their body. Carpenter bees have a similar body shape – appearing large for bees – but they lack the hair. This makes them shiny and often darker in appearance.
Carpenter Bees Do Sting
Carpenter bees are usually not aggressive, but they will respond to a perceived threat. Male carpenter bees lack a stinger, but female bees will sting you.
Get Rid of Carpenter Bees
Carpenter bees don’t create hives. Instead, they will bore a hole into wood. This hole acts like a suburban road – many bees may enter it and each builds a home of their own (a gallery) that runs along it. A single carpenter bee bore hole may actually lead to galleries belonging to various different species of bee. In addition to this, carpenter bees tend to localize. One hole leading to many homes may mean that there are other holes dotted across your property.
At Slug-A-Bug, we use integrated pest management as a way to not just get rid of carpenter bees, but to prevent them from considering your home as a legitimate place to nest. Integrated pest management looks at the entire environment and ways to make it repel carpenter bees as well as other pests.