To Kill a Bumble Bee

Who would want to kill a Bumble Bee? No one should really. Especially if you have a flower garden. Bee Fact: There are 250 different kinds of bumblebee in the world. Bumble Bees help pollinate our plants and are actually useful. Carpenter Bees on the other hand (they look almost exactly like Bumble Bees) are worth taking a look at.  Bee Fact: Bumble Bees always nest in the ground. Carpenter Bees nest in holes they bore in wood.

The idea of anything boring a hole anywhere in your house does not set well with most people. We have all seen little piles of saw dust on our decks or porches then spotted the holes left open to fill with moisture and begin to rot.

According to The Augusta Chronicle, "The holes carpenter bees bore are for making nests. The holes go about an inch deep into the wood, and then the tunnel turns to go two to four inches down the length of the board. They bore about 1 inch every six days."

"To kill and discourage the bees from boring, you can spray all the exposed wood surfaces that they might attack with an insecticide such as carbaryl (Sevin), or a synthetic pyrethroid (i.e. permethrin, cyfluthrin, bifenthrin, etc.). These only last one to two weeks, so you must spray two or three times while the bees are active."

I found a quick way to help end the bee boring: Please observe....The Bee Trap.

The bees crawl in the hole, fall down into the glass and stay there until they die. This particular trap hangs on my wife's mom's porch and I have seen the glass jar almost full of dead bees.

To empty the jar, simply unscrew it, pour the dead bees out and screw it back on. Maybe a bit inhumane, but hey, death to all things that want to drill holes in my house.

So Bumble Bees are good, don't kill them. Carpenter Bees are bad...knock your self out.