Be on the lookout for carpenter bees buzzing around, chewing holes in your exposed wood around your home. Our early warm spring weather has brought these bees out early this spring.

Carpenter bees resemble bumblebees. They tend to fly and hover around areas where they may be chewing into wood.

Most bees are valuable pollinators of plants, but from a pollination standpoint, carpenter bees are actually flower robbers because they tend to suck out nectar from a flower without pollinating it, according to our Extension entomologist, Dr. Keith Deleplane. They have short tongues and actually have to bite through the flower in order to reach the nectar.

They are really good at chewing holes into the eaves of buildings. A long-lasting population of carpenter bees can eventually weaken the timbers of a building as they feed and do their damage.

Carpenter bees look very similar to bumblebees except that they don’t have the yellow hairs on their abdomen. They do have some yellow hairs on them, just not on their abdomen. They are mostly black in color and are about an inch long.

Carpenter bees are usually found around porch ceilings, windowsills, doorframes, headers and siding. They fly or hover around these places without any fear of people in the area.

They cause damage by chewing half-inch round holes into the wood. Normally, you may realize that they are attacking your wood by seeing sawdust on the ground or floor or even on plants that may be growing beneath the point where the bees are doing their tunneling.

Carpenter bees don’t usually bore into wood that is decayed or covered with bark. They like softer wood such as southern yellow pine, white pine, California redwood, cedar, Douglas fir, and cypress.

They will usually drill about an inch into the wood and then tunnel along the grain for a distance of about 4 to 6 inches. They often come back year after year and use the same tunnels, extending them to a maximum length of 6 to 9 feet. They nest in the same tunnels every year and each new generation makes their own nest partitions out of chewed up wood.

Controlling carpenter bees requires a ladder and a pressurized sprayer. Spraying an insecticide on the wood surface won’t work. You must inject the insecticide into each bored-out hole to be effective.

April and May are ideal months to spray for carpenter bees. At this time, you can tell which holes are active and should be treated. If you see sawdust or bee feces near a hole in the wood, treat it with an insecticide.

It is probably a good idea to treat at night if you can. That way you will usually kill both the adults and the brood. If you spray during the day, the adults may be gone and then they will just start a new colony somewhere else.

After you spray and inject the holes with insecticide, it’s a good idea to go back and plug the holes with caulking or wood putty. Carpenter bees don’t like paint so painting the wood after caulking will also help. August is a good time to go back and plug up vacated holes in the wood and paint over them.

For control, apply any insecticide currently labeled for carpenter bees that includes the active ingredients cyfluthrin, bifenthrin, permethrin, esfenvalerate, carbaryl, or lambda-cypermethrin. Always check the label of any product you plan to use for carpenter bee control before you use it and make sure that carpenter bees are listed on the label.

Dust materials should be applied into carpenter bee holes and sprays should be injected directly into the holes as well. Re-spray liquid materials every two weeks if carpenter bees are still seen and are active after treating.

For more information on carpenter bees, call our Jones County Extension Office at 986-3958. (Some information in this article supplied by Dr. Keith Deleplane, Extension entomologist - apiculture, the University of Georgia.)