# wood boaring bees



## joecaption (Nov 30, 2011)

Treat the wood with boric acid.
Mix it up with warm water in a pump sprayer.
If you look for Roach Away in any dollar store, Home Store, Even Wal-Mart it's 95% Boric acid.
Google Boric acid and see the dozens of things it's used for.


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## hidden1 (Feb 3, 2008)

will that mixture kill it on contact, once it hits it,like if i spray it when i see it?


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## joecaption (Nov 30, 2011)

No, it kills by dehydrating them.
If you can find a hole they have bored you can squirt so wasp spray in the hole. That will kill the larvae they have laid and the bee when they go back in.
Do it late in the day or better yet at night.


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## hidden1 (Feb 3, 2008)

I think they are going in from behind the vinyl siding vent openings


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## Jmayspaint (May 4, 2013)

If you can get to the hole the bees go into, one trick is to use a can of W-D40 with the straw. Plush the straw as far into the hole as you can and spray. This kills the bees and renders the hole uninhabitable. Then take a crumpled piece of tin foil and wedge it in the hole. Caulk on top of that. 

Just caulking the holes doesn't work well, they just chew through it. The borate treatments help, but if there established in the house, it helps more to kill the nests.


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## eharri3 (Jul 31, 2013)

I noticed carpenter bees chewing at my deck and trellis around late April last year. Did a lot of research before I combatted the problem. What I found was

Swatting them kills one at a time but does not stop an infestation.

Squirting the holes with WD40 kills the one adult bee that is in each hole, but does not affect the dozens of other bees around your property that will just find new wood to chew into.

The most effective way of tackling this is to blow an insecticide dust as far as it will go into each hole using a handheld puffing device with a long flexible tube at the end. Have eye protection and gloves on when you do it. I use Seven dust, readily available at Home Depot and highly effective for all kinds of insects. The dust will be protected from the elements in there. It won't degrade, break down, or wash away over time, and its knock down power will be maximized because it will sit on top of the wood without being absorbed into it. This kills the adult bees that come and go as well as the 4-6 babies that will eventually hatch in there. If you want to end the infestation and do it quickly this has to be done. Don't caulk or seal anything until the fall when you know all adult bees have come in contact with the powder and died from it and all babies hatched and then touched the poison on their way out. Otherwise those holes will be bored out again or there will be new ones next to them. Any plan that leaves out getting something directly into those holes, whether done by you or an exterminator, will not, by itself, be as effective.

That's how I took care of it last year, cost me 20 bucks and about an hour's time. This year I had an exterminator put a 90 day residual liquid insecticide on my exterior wood structures before doing the normal preventative spray on the rest of the house. I also put a couple traps up that I bought on Amazon.com for good measure. Now there basically is no un-treated exposed wood outside my house except for the traps, which caught several bees last year but remain empty this time.

So far so good, no bees spotted and no new holes and this is about the time when they should be out and about. Occasionally I'll see one zoom through my yard but it only hovers for a couple minutes before moving onto another property. I will probably stick to a routine that involves aggressive preventative exterior treatments as soon as the weather warms up in April or March of every year.


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