What is a Carpenter Bee? 🔨🐝 And How Can I Get Rid of Carpenter Bees Without Killing Them?
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- Опубликовано: 20 июн 2024
- What is a carpenter bee? And how can I get rid of carpenter bees naturally? Learn all the carpenter bee things today on Science with Mr. Harris!
0:00 Introduction
0:20 What is a Carpenter Bee?
1:22 What is Boris doing in my backyard?
2:32 How to get rid of Carpenter Bees without killing them
This is Boris. Boris is an Eastern Carpenter Bee, and is a yearly visitor to my house. He spends a couple of weeks in May hovering around my backyard, attacking any other carpenter bees that venture into his territory. What the heck is Boris doing? And what the heck is a carpenter bee and how can I get rid of carpenter bees without killing them!
The second question first. A carpenter bee is a big bee. They’re a group of bee species that include some of the largest bees out there. For this reason they often get confused with bumble bees. Pro tip: you can settle the carpenter bee vs. bumble bee debate because carpenter bees have a shiny abdomen (fancy science word for basically their bee bum) is shiny, whereas bumble bees don’t.
Carpenter bees are different from bumble bees and honey bees in that they don’t live in large hives with other bees. Like bumble bees they don’t make honey, and carpenter bees pollinate lots of plants including ones for vegetable farmers and home gardeners like me.
Carpenter bees are well, carpenters! They nest in wood! They have very sharp mantibles (bee teeth) that can bore through solid wood to create their nests. It works like this. A female carpenter bee, often with 2-3 other female carpenter bee friends, will create a nest in a piece of wood. They start by boring against the grain of the wood, and then turn to go with the grain (its easier), making a long tunnel. They then go about collecting pollen and nectar.
Once they’re collected enough, they begin to lay eggs, which are each provisioned with a sphere of bee bread, a doughy mixture of pollen and nectar, which will feed the baby bee once it has hatched into larvae. Once the egg has been given enough bee bread, the tunnel is sealed up, and a new egg is laid, and so on until the whole tunnel is filled with larvae happily eating bee bread. Once they’ve matured into adults, the new bees bore their way out of the tunnel to begin their lives. Interestingly, the larvae all develop into adult bees at the same time despite being different ages, so they’re all ready to bore their way out at the same time. Usually a carpenter bee nest is made up of 1 female in her second summer, and a small group of other females in their first summer. That’s a carpenter bee! So what the heck is Boris doing hovering in my backyard.
Well, Boris is defending his territory from other male bees of his species. Males establish territory near the nest entrances of females. Once he mates with the female bees, he will promptly die. Sorry Borris.
I think carpenter bees are super cool, and I don’t mind that they live in my shed. Carpenter bees are very unlikely to sting unless handled roughly (think trapped in your clothes), and the males don’t even have a stinger. They are also great pollinators. However some people don’t really like them, and fair enough! How can we get rid of carpenter bees without killing them?
Well, firstly carpenter bees don't really like to dig new tunnels because it's a lot of work to chew through all that wood, and they're likely to return to the same tunnel year after year. One thing you can do is just plug up the carpenter bee hole when they emerge in the spring. This will force them to drill another hole, hopefully somewhere else that is more convenient.
You can also provide them with a sacrificial nesting site. This is kind of like a carpenter bee trap, but a little nicer. An unvarnished and unpainted chunk of raw softwood, like cedar or pine, in a convenient spot with a little overhang will prove irresistible to any carpenter bee looking for a nest. Once they have nested inside, you can simply move the sacrificial piece of wood to a safe place, far away from your home.
Finally, how to protect wood from carpenter bees? Making sure that there is no exposed bare wood on your property by painting and varnishing external surfaces or installing vinyl siding will go a long way towards discouraging these bee friends from setting up shop.
**Side note: we’re talking about the so-called “large” carpenter bees. There are also small carpenter bees that are totally cool too, but they’re so small you probably wouldn’t even notice them in your yard unless you went looking for them. **
Sources
Wilson, Joseph S., and Olivia J. Messinger Carril. The bees in your backyard. Princeton University Press, 2015.
www.gopests.com/remove-carpen...
Image Sources:
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Bees, ants, flys, butterflies, jumping spiders do not make my skin crawl. Adorable one are the bees, jumping spiders and butterflies.
🐝🦋🕷
I set up a carpenter bee house and bat house. I released ladybugs 5yrs ago and all these misunderstood creatures eat harmful pests or pollinate my vegetable garden.
Informative video. I didn't know they existed until someone I know said they had some nesting in their backyard.
thanks for the comment! glad you found it informative ☺️
I love your bee videos. Please make more!
Hey thank you! Working on it!
Great informative video. I watch a video of a guy on his deck and he mentioned he has a lot of bees around and they might be carpenter bees. I was like whats that? So i searched on RUclips and found your video. Learn something new everyday 😁
hey that’s great! thanks for the comment!
Our deck wood is painted white, and we still have them. The floor looks like a beaver flew up into the bannister.
oh goodness that’s not good! 🦫 🐝
To be honest as a kid, i didnt know the names for this bug. I thought what people called yellow jacket was for this bee, because they have those yellow "fur" jacket on their body. Lol.
Thanks i saw a carpenter bee on my peir in the afternoon
Thank you
I like to watch the carpenter bees gather pollen in my backyard. Every time one lands on a flower to gather pollen it makes a distinctive buzz sound that lasts for a fraction of a second. I live in southern California where the carpenter bees have big round black bodies. I have never seen evidence of them boring holes in finished lumber; it's the termites that do that. But I have noticed that they like to bore holes in eucalyptus tree stumps. Unfortunately for the bees, ants would crawl in the bees' holes and chew off their wings. I have found many a dead bee at the base of a tree, and the bee had one or both of its wings missing.
Thanks for sharing! i think that buzzing might be what’s called buzz pollination, where they buzz the flower to help loosen the pollen. Our carpenter bees out east have yellow on them which is why I illustrated them like that in the video but many species are all black
Bees are the best 😍
Totally! 👍🏼🐝
@@SciencewithMrHarris I’m a cute bee sleeping
@@veshremypolice6968 💤🐝💤
I love them. I have several carpenter bees on my porch :)
Dude ur vids are insane
Hey thanks so much! Appreciate the feedback :)
"Bee eggs don't look like this IRL" 😂😂😂
haha yes, one of many artistic liberties I wish I hadn’t taken!
I have a carpenter bees in my garden and they have a house in my garden they're 2 bees i also watched them on how they build their homes
i love watching bees too 👀 🐝
LOVE MY HOWARD! he chases off all other flying jerks
haha good work Howard!! glad I’m not the only one that names my backyard bees ☺️
I see many of them but when I get near them they get somehow crazy and bzzzzzzzzzzzzzz...
I just want to picture them but I leave every time ...because I don't wanna be attacked 😔
They just do that to seem more aggressive than they actually are but they’re very nice …..they live in my back porch and just fly around making holes
Totally! The males come out early in the year and they're they ones that go crazy and bzzzzz (this is what Boris the Bee was doing in my backyard). A bit later in the year the females come out, they're much easier to get photos of while they're busy collecting pollen 🐝🌷
I just took a video of my friend Howard the bee 🐝 he’s amazing! Kills other flying jerk insects
Music too loud 😳
I poured liquor out for Boris.
hahaha poor Boris!! ☠️ 🐝
my mom used to murder these all day with a fly swatter. I kinda liked them. They never really bother people and one might get in your face if you're close to the nest but I mean. If you're gentle you can go so far as to hold them and make lil' homes for em'
That's super cute :)
ruclips.net/video/CGrWvcRy8_8/видео.html
I just don’t like them nesting in my wooden deck. I need my deck to last and I don’t need carpenter bees making it their home every year. I have traps outside to catch them. Sorry, but you could have chosen the hundreds of trees in my yard and instead chose my deck. You’re getting traps now.
fair enough! i think there’s always a balance between helping to preserve nature and making sure our property doesn’t get damaged. consider putting out another location for them to nest next spring so they don’t come back to your porch!
As a person in pest control varnish and Painting does not work
Any tips for homeowners looking to avoid killing the little rascals? 🐝
They eat though paint, so that didn't work.
日本のクマバチも可愛いですよ。 ruclips.net/video/2P7A4LBliGo/видео.html
Sorry man they eat my wood siding, they face the tennis racket
Fair enough!
These bees have ruined my whole back deck
Sorry to hear that! Obviously my tips are for much earlier on in the process. Hope it's not too much to fix!
That just gives them a breeding ground to multiply, spread, and do more damage to people's structures.
That is definitely one way of thinking about it! I prefer to think of it as, you're giving them more breeding ground to pollinate our food and contribute to our ecosystems. Making sure your porch/wooden structures are painted will go a long way towards limiting damage on people's structures. Remember, it's been estimated that 75% of our food rely at least in part on the work of pollinators like these bees 🥗🐝
@@SciencewithMrHarris but not carpenter Bees
@@coffeelink943 Actually carpenter bees too! It's hard to get exact figures on it, but it's estimated that native pollinators (like carpenter bees), can provide over $10 billion in free pollination services to US farmers annually
Lxg
Stack "firewoods" works too
Music is annoying and way too loud