<p>We’re having persistent problems with carpenter/wood bees attacking our house and neighborhood. Anyone have any suggestions on what has worked? Has anyone tried the wooden carpenter bee traps like those pictured here? [Carpenter</a> Bee Trap - Gardening Supplies - Compare Prices, Reviews and Buy at Nextag - Price - Review](<a href=“nextag.com domain name is for sale. Inquire now.”>nextag.com domain name is for sale. Inquire now.)</p>
<p>Anyone with other suggestions of what has worked for them? It’s a huge problem in our neighborhood and would really love some effective suggestions. H has been working to patch the holes they’ve drilled & is slowly painting the house, but they are SO destructive around here.</p>
<p>I hate to be the anti-environmental bearer of bad news, but we had them for years until we called in an exterminator and now we are bee-free ever since</p>
<p>We live in the woods. With a wood frame and wood shake roof. They are a recurring problem. We have found that if you spray into the holes at the time of day they are likely in the holes, and if you spray every single hole you can find in one sitting, you will go for a time without any bees. You might go a season or two. We went as long as five years once. They will likely be back. And you do it all over again. They don’t go for painted or sealed surfaces, so the more paint and the less stained/exposed wood the better. Otherwise, it is a battle if they live in the same neighborhood you live.</p>
<p>I"m very interested in comments. We have had them in our deck but we could reach those holes, so it was easy to spray those spots. Yesterday my husband was on the roof cleaning the gutters and he found them up there. In this location, we can not reach the holes and so we are unsure about how to handle this.</p>
<p>The home improvement stores we went to had different sprays to kill the bees while they are flying as well as a foam you can spray into the holes. They did NOT have traps like the one in the link I posted, so we may just go ahead & buy 4 of them with free shipping & see how well (or poorly) they work. I will report back.</p>
<p>Would LOVE to know if anyone has any experience with the carpenter/wood bee traps, since it looks considerably different from the other wasp & bee traps that are carried by stores around here. Reminds me of a birdhouse with much smaller entry holes.</p>
<p>We had them in our walls and ceiling of our basement and tried various things. What worked was an exterminator coming over and squeezing some brown stuff out of a caulk tube (+gun) into the false ceiling. Ants were gone in two weeks. He put in maybe three or four pieces of about one inch of the stuff. It has the consistency of taffy. Apparently the carpenter ants are attracted to it and bring it back to the colony and it kills the colony. This was three years ago I think and we haven’t had any problems since then.</p>
<p>Here’s a video on how to build your own bee trap(s) using scrap lumber. If the link is deleted, you can just put carpenter bee trap in your search engine and watch a video on youtube about how to make it yourself. H says it is too much work for him, so we’ll be buying a few of these for our property.</p>
<p>The BEES are more persistent and difficult for us than the ants. When we had the entire house fumigated for termites, there were quite a number of dead carpenter bees around, but the live ones are back & burrowing!</p>
<p>OK, just bought 4 traps on ebay with free shipping & am waiting to receive them. They were available at a lower price on ebay but no free shipping to HI. Am hoping this will help us get rid of these pesky bees once & for all!</p>
<p>Watched the video and I was curious as to how it worked as it isn’t obvious from the picture of it. It uses two coke bottle pieces, a short top to funnel the bees into the larger coke bottle and to make it hard for them to get out. I guess that they could technically get out but maybe there is something in their programming to try to escape along the sides of something.</p>
<p>It would have been nice if he had video of a bee going into the trap but I guess that bees in the trap itself is decent evidence. It looks like a fun Home Depot project.</p>
<p>A long time ago, I had a second phone line installed for dial-up for our business work and the phone guy came over to install it. He went up on the pole to make a new connection and then called me over and asked me to get a can out of his van and toss it up to him which I did. He told me to stand back. He shot the stuff in the can into the box with the connections for the street - about five feet away. Seconds later dead bees fell to the ground. He was wearing gloves. I assume that the stuff in that can was pretty toxic and the stuff is probably banned today.</p>
<p>Actually, there are a lot of sprays & some “dusts” for treating these bees. One of the issues is that they will burrow in areas that are difficult to reach & treat so you can irradicate them. I bought several different sprays today & will use them WITH these traps, which appear to be quite popular. In other videos, I do see bees flying into the traps (early am & early evening is when they seem most active).</p>