Bumblebee problems

[sleek]

I have a 100 year old wooden barn that these wood carving bees are making a home of. How best to deter them from destroying my barn?

[TimBo]

Sounds like carpenter bees.  Supposedly they won't burrow into painted surfaces.  You can try drilling a bunch of 3/8" holes in a few scrap 4x4s (the wood, not the vehicles...); I have read that they will use that for nests since it is less work.

[Eric Krewson]

What you need are bee traps, I dumped 25 bees out of one of my traps a couple of days ago. In the years before I put out traps I had at least 6 or 7 bees drilling my deck wood all the time in different places all summer.

I caught a lot of bees every year after I put out traps and gradually went from a bunch of bees drilling to no bees drilling. I suspect they come back to where they were hatched every year and continue the cycle in the same hole, by catching them I interrupted their life cycle.

All my bee traps have been built like little birdhouses in the past with a gatorade bottle to hold the bees.

[Eric Krewson]

I am building a new style this year out of a 4"X4"x6", much faster to build and hopefully will catch bees at the same rate as the older style I made in the past. I put a bunch of the new style up yesterday.

There are a lot of bee trap videos on you tube.

[JonW]

We had a lot of fun with those bees and a badminton racket when we were kids 

[EdwardS]

Boffer arrows and slow flying bees are another fun concept.

[archeryrob]

Yea, the carpenter bees are tough. U used to help my daughter with the horses and would have the feed scoop and whack them with it. They would fly 20' after I hit them and I'd have to chase them down and step on them before they recovered or they would get back up. The traps are awesome to reduce them.

When I was a kid, I used to take my crossman pellet gun out in the morning, unloaded. Pump it up ten times and put the muzzle in the bee holes and pull the trigger. Repeat on as many holes as I could reach and I halved the population in a day.

[bronco611]

you can hang a brown paper bag stuffed with other loosely wadded paper bags to imitate a hornets nest neat the barn where they are at and they will leave , carpenter bees and hornets do not get along.

[Eric Krewson]

My new design is catching them like crazy, I made 14 from a $12 4X4 from HD, If I cut the height to 5" I could have gotten a couple more from the same piece of wood.