Carpenter Bee Identification & Prevention

It isn't always easy to get rid of carpenter bees in Knoxville. If you only have one or two bees nesting on your property, you can easily seal their holes with a little wood filler to encourage them to leave and nest elsewhere. However, this solution is not tenable if you have hundreds of carpenter bees infesting your property.

In this case, you'll need to call the experts here at Southeast Termite & Pest Control. Our carpenter bee solutions are much more sophisticated than a little wood filler, and we can handle any size infestation you have. If you need someone to safely and effectively remove your carpenter bee infestation, don't hesitate to call us or visit our contact page to schedule a free inspection on pest control.

Carpenter bees love to be in areas where they can bore deep nests and fill them with eggs. They love to infest wood that can offer deep shelter. Look for them in decks, wood columns, wooden ceilings, and wood siding.

The one thing that all of these places will have in common is they will be untreated wood. Carpenter bees have a very hard time boring into painted or varnished wood, so they will look for softer wood that does not have any barrier for their mandibles to cut through. Treating wood is very important in controlling carpenter bees.

Most of the time, youwind up with a carpenter bee problem because you are inadvertently attracting them. The biggest carpenter bee attractant is wood that is easy to bore into. Carpenter bees especially love decks, wooden siding and ceilings, and wood columns. If these areas are unpainted or unvarnished, they are extremely vulnerable to a carpenter bee infestation.

You may also be attracting carpenter bees if you have a lot of sweet, juicy flowers around your home. Most people think carpenter bees eat wood because of their wood-carving abilities, but they actually eat nectar and pollen just like every other kind of bee.

When you see a giant carpenter bee buzzing toward your head, you probably feel a lot of fear. However, this fear is misplaced. Carpenter bees can sting, but they rarely do. Usually, the only thing that can induce a carpenter bee to sting is physically accosting it. Furthermore, even if you are stung by a carpenter bee, unless you are allergic, the only thing you really have to worry about is a little pain and swelling at the site of the sting.

Carpenter bees are much more dangerous to your property than they are to you. If you get a serious carpenter bee infestation, this can do all kinds of damage – even structural damage – to the wood the bees infest.

Carpenter bees are relatives of honey bees and bumble bees. Unlike these bee species, carpenter bees are solitary. They don't live in colonies. They don't have a queen. They breed and nest on their own, and each carpenter bee has to dig its own hole to lay its eggs.

Carpenter bees bore holes into wood to lay their eggs. They can dig holes ranging from a foot to over tenfeet in depth! As you can imagine, getting several carpenter bee nests going in the same piece of wood can cause problems.