Woodworking Bees

If it s shiny and hairless it s a carpenter bee.

Woodworking bees. The only protection against carpenter bees is to regularly paint any bare wood or use vinyl or other types of siding. Another point of difference is that while bumble bees are social and nest in hives wood bees prefer being on their own and lay their eggs by making holes in wood and creating tunnels and chambers to use as a shelter or for nesting. Hang your trap directly above the carpenter bee holes. You can differentiate the two by examining the dorsal upper side of the abdomen.

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. Other predators include large mantises and predatory flies particularly large robber flies of the family asilidae. Large carpenter bees excavate dry unpainted and weathered wooden objects such as the following. The young adult bees hibernate in winters inside the tunnels in the wood.

The holes carpenter bees create may seem small on the outside but the galleries are much bigger and more damaging than meets the eye. Thirty minutes before hiving spray your bees heavily with sugar syrup but don t drown them with syrup. 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. Carpenter bees create large round holes in any kind of unpainted wood.

However think about the time and again when carpenter bees work on old tunnels to make brood chambers for their young ones. Woodpeckers eat carpenter bees as do various species of birds such as shrikes and bee eaters as well as some mammals such as ratels. Stained and preserved woods don t deter these pests. A hole made by a bee in a wood is just a slight damage to the wood.

If you don t have an infestation hanging traps is also a good. How to install a package of bees. Using your hive tool pry the wood cover off. These bees have a habit of drilling holes into the wood and building galleries to breed and rear their young ones.

A bumblebee by contrast has a hairy abdomen. Carpenter bees genus xylocopa are solitary bees that burrow into wood.