Carpenter bees are chubby-looking insects who are true bees, not wasps or hornets. They resemble bumble bees, except that a carpenter bee's abdomen is shiny-looking, whereas a bumble bee's is fuzzy-looking.
Carpenter bees are likable, for the most part. The females almost never sting, and the males don't even have stingers (although they like to pretend that they do). Also, like bees in general, carpenter bees are hard-working pollinators. You'll never find a lazy carpenter bee.
There's this one little habit that carpenter bees have, however, that makes people hate them: Carpenter bees drill holes in wood. Their holes are so perfectly-round that they look like they were drilled with a carpenter's brace and bit (hence their common name), and they drill them in any available piece of dead coniferous wood they can find including houses, sheds, garages, playground equipment, wooden deck chairs, and the wooden decks themselves.
Left to their own devices, carpenter bees can really do a lot of damage. And because they're strong fliers, they have a habit of drilling up high, in places you can't reach without a ladder or a cherry picker.
Female carpenter bees drill holes to lay their eggs in. They start on one face or edge of the wood, drill in a bit, take a sharp turn in the direction of the grain, and make a long tunnel.
Once the tunnels are drilled out, the carpenter bee starts laying eggs inside of them. The young complete their development inside the galleries. Very often females will return to the wood from which they emerged to lay their own eggs (making even more tunnels in the process), so carpenter bee damage can get worse every year if not treated.
Another problem with carpenter bees is that they leave ugly stains of wax, frass, and fecal material on wooden surfaces. They basically just sweep it out the hole, where it can create unsightly stains that are difficult to remove. And again, if you ignore the problem, it'll just get worse over time.
Carpenter bee fecal stains on the outside of a house
Over time, carpenter bees can cause extensive damage to homes and wooden items, as well as cause ugly stains like the ones in this picture. If you have carpenter bees boring into your home, wooden furnishing, playground equipment, or any other valuable item made of wood, you really need to get the problem taken care of.
Carpenter bee removal and damage repair can be difficult because of the heights involved. In Rid-A-Critter's case that's not a problem because we have all kinds of ways to rise to the occasion, from step stools to bucket trucks. But it's definitely not the kind of job you want to try yourself.
Our carpenter bee work is also superior to most other companies' because we not only take care of the visible holes and damage, but we also seal the bees out so they can't start drilling from the hidden side of the wood. This is very detailed work, but it's also very important. Unpainted wood such as that behind the fascia board and attic area is likely to be attacked if we don't seal the carpenter bees out. We install screening to help prevent the carpenter bees from attacking those areas.
The long and short of it is that if you want the best carpenter bee work anywhere in the Metro Atlanta area, we're the company to call. We can handle any carpenter bee job, no matter how big or how small. Just give us a call for a consultation. We look forward to hearing from you.
Metro Atlanta Carpenter Bee Control Gallery
Here are some pictures of carpenter bee work we've done in and around the Atlanta area.
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The Atlanta, Georgia office of Rid-A-Critter provides carpenter bee control and damage repair in all of Metro Atlanta including the City of Atlanta and the communities of Berkeley Lake, Buckhead, Cartersville, College Park, Conyers, Decatur, Douglasville, Duluth, Dunwoody, Fayetteville, Hull, Johns Creek, Kennesaw, Lithonia, Loganville, Mableton, Marietta, McDonough, Newnan, Norcross, Peachtree City, Powder Springs, Sandy Springs, Smyrna, Stone Mountain, and Vinings. We are fully licensed and insured.
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