Carpenter bees are common household pests that get their name from their habit of boring holes in wood.
Wood door carpenter bees. You can find bee traps online in pest control and home gardening stores and in some department stores. Carpenter bees also known as wood bees because of their diet and choice of habitat are large black bees that look very similar to bumble bees. The holes carpenter bees create may seem small on the outside but the galleries are much bigger and more damaging than meets the eye. These are usually in the eaves of homes as well as in decks siding fascia boards or porches.
There are small carpenter bees too that belong to the ceratinini family. Look under decks picnic tables stairs or any unfinished wood surface in the area. Carpenter bees do not feed on wood but bore into it to create nesting galleries where they lay eggs in the spring and take shelter in the winter. No it s not for their food.
Carpenter bees genus xylocopa are solitary bees that burrow into wood. Carpenter bees as the name have the behavior to drill into the wood. While the pests do not eat wood they excavate tunnels to use as nests. You can differentiate the two by examining the dorsal upper side of the abdomen.
If you don t have an infestation hanging traps is also a good. Unlike other common bees such as honeybees and bumble bees that live in colonies carpenter bees are not social insects and build individual nests into trees outdoors or into the frames eaves or sides of buildings. These bees have a habit of drilling holes into the wood and building galleries to breed and rear their young ones. Hang your trap directly above the carpenter bee holes.
The tunnels these bees create within wooden structures are used as nesting grounds for the females to lay eggs. Carpenter bees make their homes in wood and sometimes their nests are hard to spot. But they use the hole inside the wood as their nest. Carpenter bees do not eat wood but cause damage to structures by drilling circular holes to create tunnels inside wood.
Unfinished or weathered wood attracts the robust black and yellow carpenter bee. You can differentiate the two by examining the dorsal upper side of the abdomen. They can dig neatly through wood. They don t eat wood.
Belonging to the genus xylocopa carpenter bees are large bees having a size of around 3 4 to 1 inch. When you see several large bees hovering around in the same place every day there is probably a nest somewhere nearby. Now why are they called carpenter bees.