CARPENTER BEES
- Thread starter wareagle
- Start date
I don't know about carpenter bees, but I think I have the record for most wasp nests in my house, fawkers drive you crazy.
Poison the bastards, quick too.
Poison the bastards, quick too.
How to Get Rid of Carpenter Bees
Natural Carpenter Bee Control
There doesn't appear to be any "natural" or "organic" way to control carpenter bees. However, there are a couple of things you can do to protect your home from carpenter bee damage.
Building a home with hardwoods rather than softwoods is a good way to naturally keep carpenter bees away from your home. Carpenter bees prefer softwoods like white pine, cedar, California redwoods, and Douglas firs. Simply put: pine bad, oak & maple good.
Using treated lumber to build your home or extensions to your home is a good idea. Generally speaking, carpenter bees will steer clear of any lumber that has been treated. They prefer untreated, softwoods.
Paint your home and keep the paint in good condition if you want to prevent a carpenter bee infestation. Just like treated lumber, carpenter bees will avoid any kind of wood that's covered with paint. Varnish and stain doesn not ensure that carpenter bees will stay away from your timbers. Polyurethane paints are your best defense against carpenter bees.
I sit outside a lot when I?m writing, or thinking about a new design, or pondering how to approach a certain article, and more often than not I cross paths with bumble bees. Our porch is surrounded by wild roses. Now, bumble bees have always interested me because nobody really knows much about them?no one I know, anyway. Turns out, they may not have been bumble bees at all. If you see a bumble bee that has a predominantly black abdomen, it may in fact be a carpenter bee. Carpenter bees are very similar to bumble bees, in appearance. The most noticeable difference is that bumble bees have black abdomens covered with yellow hairs, and carpenter bees do not. The bee to the right in the image above is the one who will eat your house.
So, you have to wonder how long you?ve been noticing carpenter bees instead of actual Bumble Bees. A carpenter bee infestation is usually indicated by mounds of saw dust on the ground below an awning, or yellowish-brown feces that tend to accumulate on the walls near a nest, or maybe even constant bombardment by a noisy lot of bees that don?t bother to sting you. Sometimes a serious Carpenter bee infestation is noticed because the wood they?ve infested is pocked with holes from their burrowing and their predator?s attempts to eat them. Either way, below are some practical advice about how to get rid of carpenter bees and how to keep carpenter bees away for good.
Carpenter Bee Control
Suggestions or Questions?
If you want to get rid of carpenter bees without using insecticide you may want to try plugging the entrances with caulk or putty. Now you?re thinking, ?but won?t they try to burrow their way out?? The answer is no. For whatever reason, carpenter bees will not try to get out of the nest if they?re trapped inside. So, a lot of people simply caulk or putty the entrances to the carpenter bee galleries and then paint over them. It?ll save you money and time.
Another way to get rid of carpenter bees without using insecticide is to agitate and vacuum them out. This can only be accomplished if the nest is relatively new, and only in the early evening when the bees have returned to the nest and are relatively slow. A new colony will sometimes consist of only 20 or so bees, with one queen. If you notice that the colony is relatively small, you may want to consider waiting outside of the nest with a vacuum cleaner while poking the nest with a stick.
Any bee killer such as those offered by Raid can be used to get rid of carpenter bees. This is obviously the traditional method of carpenter bee control, and like any other bee infestation you should take steps to ensure that you are properly dressed and make certain that it?s late enough in the evening to get all of the bees. Once you are sure all or most of the bees are in the nest, simply pull out your bee killer, spray a good bit into the nest, and wait to see if any bees come out. Go ahead and do this twice, just to make sure.
Once you have killed the bees, make sure you keep them away by replacing the wood or covering the damage with putty. If the bees haven?t done too much damage and you?re not going to spend any money on timber replacement, cover the entrances to the galleries with putty so other bees don?t decide to take up residence there. Otherwise, if you have the money, it might be a good idea to replace any timber the carpenter bees have damaged?and take the next piece of advice seriously.
To make sure carpenter bees don?t invade the outside of your home again, either install vinyl siding or have your home painted regularly. Vinyl siding (or any other non-wood siding) really is the only way you?re going to ensure that carpenter bees don?t damage your home. Of course, there are the purists among us who will not stand for such nonsense. To those purists I say: go ahead and use wood to side your house, but you better be damn well certain you keep the paint is kept up?wood stain won?t stop carpenter bees.
February 27, 2007
Honeybees Vanish, Leaving Crops and Keepers in Peril
By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO
VISALIA, Calif., Feb. 23 * David Bradshaw has endured countless stings during his life as a beekeeper, but he got the shock of his career when he opened his boxes last month and found half of his 100 million bees missing.
In 24 states throughout the country, beekeepers have gone through similar shocks as their bees have been disappearing inexplicably at an alarming rate, threatening not only their livelihoods but also the production of numerous crops, including California almonds, one of the nation's most profitable.
"I have never seen anything like it," Mr. Bradshaw, 50, said from an almond orchard here beginning to bloom. "Box after box after box are just empty. There's nobody home."
The sudden mysterious losses are highlighting the critical link that honeybees play in the long chain that gets fruit and vegetables to supermarkets and dinner tables across the country.
Beekeepers have fought regional bee crises before, but this is the first national affliction.
Now, in a mystery worthy of Agatha Christie, bees are flying off in search of pollen and nectar and simply never returning to their colonies. And nobody knows why. Researchers say the bees are presumably dying in the fields, perhaps becoming exhausted or simply disoriented and eventually falling victim to the cold.
As researchers scramble to find answers to the syndrome they have decided to call "colony collapse disorder," growers are becoming openly nervous about the capability of the commercial bee industry to meet the growing demand for bees to pollinate dozens of crops, from almonds to avocados to kiwis.
Along with recent stresses on the bees themselves, as well as on an industry increasingly under consolidation, some fear this disorder may force a breaking point for even large beekeepers.
A Cornell University study has estimated that honeybees annually pollinate more than $14 billion worth of seeds and crops in the United States, mostly fruits, vegetables and nuts. "Every third bite we consume in our diet is dependent on a honeybee to pollinate that food," said Zac Browning, vice president of the American Beekeeping Federation.
The bee losses are ranging from 30 to 60 percent on the West Coast, with some beekeepers on the East Coast and in Texas reporting losses of more than 70 percent; beekeepers consider a loss of up to 20 percent in the offseason to be normal.
Beekeepers are the nomads of the agriculture world, working in obscurity in their white protective suits and frequently trekking around the country with their insects packed into 18-wheelers, looking for pollination work.
Once the domain of hobbyists with a handful of backyard hives, beekeeping has become increasingly commercial and consolidated. Over the last two decades, the number of beehives, now estimated by the Agriculture Department to be 2.4 million, has dropped by a quarter and the number of beekeepers by half.
Pressure has been building on the bee industry. The costs to maintain hives, also known as colonies, are rising along with the strain on bees of being bred to pollinate rather than just make honey. And beekeepers are losing out to suburban sprawl in their quest for spots where bees can forage for nectar to stay healthy and strong during the pollination season.
"There are less beekeepers, less bees, yet more crops to pollinate," Mr. Browning said. "While this sounds sweet for the bee business, with so much added loss and expense due to disease, pests and higher equipment costs, profitability is actually falling."
Some 15 worried beekeepers convened in Florida this month to brainstorm with researchers how to cope with the extensive bee losses. Investigators are exploring a range of theories, including viruses, a fungus and poor bee nutrition.
They are also studying a group of pesticides that were banned in some European countries to see if they are somehow affecting bees' innate ability to find their way back home.
It could just be that the bees are stressed out. Bees are being raised to survive a shorter offseason, to be ready to pollinate once the almond bloom begins in February. That has most likely lowered their immunity to viruses.
Mites have also damaged bee colonies, and the insecticides used to try to kill mites are harming the ability of queen bees to spawn as many worker bees. The queens are living half as long as they did just a few years ago.
Researchers are also concerned that the willingness of beekeepers to truck their colonies from coast to coast could be adding to bees' stress, helping to spread viruses and mites and otherwise accelerating whatever is afflicting them.
Dennis van Engelsdorp, a bee specialist with the state of Pennsylvania who is part of the team studying the bee colony collapses, said the "strong immune suppression" investigators have observed "could be the AIDS of the bee industry," making bees more susceptible to other diseases that eventually kill them off.
Growers have tried before to do without bees. In past decades, they have used everything from giant blowers to helicopters to mortar shells to try to spread pollen across the plants. More recently researchers have been trying to develop "self-compatible" almond trees that will require fewer bees. One company is even trying to commercialize the blue orchard bee, which is virtually stingless and works at colder temperatures than the honeybee.
Beekeepers have endured two major mite infestations since the 1980s, which felled many hobbyist beekeepers, and three cases of unexplained disappearing disorders as far back as 1894. But those episodes were confined to small areas, Mr. van Engelsdorp said.
Today the industry is in a weaker position to deal with new stresses. A flood of imported honey from China and Argentina has depressed honey prices and put more pressure on beekeepers to take to the road in search of pollination contracts. Beekeepers are trucking tens of billions of bees around the country every year.
California's almond crop, by far the biggest in the world, now draws more than half of the country's bee colonies in February. The crop has been both a boon to commercial beekeeping and a burden, as pressure mounts for the industry to fill growing demand. Now spread over 580,000 acres stretched across 300 miles of California's Central Valley, the crop is expected to grow to 680,000 acres by 2010.
Beekeepers now earn many times more renting their bees out to pollinate crops than in producing honey. Two years ago a lack of bees for the California almond crop caused bee rental prices to jump, drawing beekeepers from the East Coast.
This year the price for a bee colony is about $135, up from $55 in 2004, said Joe Traynor, a bee broker in Bakersfield, Calif.
A typical bee colony ranges from 15,000 to 30,000 bees. But beekeepers' costs are also on the rise. In the past decade, fuel, equipment and even bee boxes have doubled and tripled in price.
The cost to control mites has also risen, along with the price of queen bees, which cost about $15 each, up from $10 three years ago.
To give bees energy while they are pollinating, beekeepers now feed them protein supplements and a liquid mix of sucrose and corn syrup carried in tanker-sized trucks costing $12,000 per load. Over all, Mr. Bradshaw figures, in recent years he has spent $145 a hive annually to keep his bees alive, for a profit of about $11 a hive, not including labor expenses. The last three years his net income has averaged $30,000 a year from his 4,200 bee colonies, he said.
"A couple of farmers have asked me, 'Why are you doing this?' " Mr. Bradshaw said. "I ask myself the same thing. But it is a job I like. It is a lifestyle. I work with my dad every day. And now my son is starting to work with us."
Almonds fetch the highest prices for bees, but if there aren't enough bees to go around, some growers may be forced to seek alternatives to bees or change their variety of trees.
"It would be nice to know that we have a dependable source of honey bees," said Martin Hein, an almond grower based in Visalia. "But at this point I don't know that we have that for the amount of acres we have got."
To cope with the losses, beekeepers have been scouring elsewhere for bees to fulfill their contracts with growers. Lance Sundberg, a beekeeper from Columbus, Mont., said he spent $150,000 in the last two weeks buying 1,000 packages of bees * amounting to 14 million bees * from Australia.
He is hoping the Aussie bees will help offset the loss of one-third of the 7,600 hives he manages in six states. "The fear is that when we mix the bees the die-offs will continue to occur," Mr. Sundberg said.
Migratory beekeeping is a lonely life that many compare to truck driving. Mr. Sundberg spends more than half the year driving 20 truckloads of bees around the country. In Terra Bella, an hour south of Visalia, Jack Brumley grimaced from inside his equipment shed as he watched Rosa Pati?o use a flat tool to scrape dried honey from dozens of beehive frames that once held bees. Some 2,000 empty boxes * which once held one-third of his total hives * were stacked to the roof.
Beekeepers must often plead with landowners to allow bees to be placed on their land to forage for nectar. One large citrus grower has pushed for California to institute a "no-fly zone" for bees of at least two miles to prevent them from pollinating a seedless form of Mandarin orange.
But the quality of forage might make a difference. Last week Mr. Bradshaw used a forklift to remove some of his bee colonies from a spot across a riverbed from orange groves. Only three of the 64 colonies there have died or disappeared.
"It will probably take me two to three more years to get back up," he said. "Unless I spend gobs of money I don't have."
Honeybees Vanish, Leaving Crops and Keepers in Peril
By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO
VISALIA, Calif., Feb. 23 * David Bradshaw has endured countless stings during his life as a beekeeper, but he got the shock of his career when he opened his boxes last month and found half of his 100 million bees missing.
In 24 states throughout the country, beekeepers have gone through similar shocks as their bees have been disappearing inexplicably at an alarming rate, threatening not only their livelihoods but also the production of numerous crops, including California almonds, one of the nation's most profitable.
"I have never seen anything like it," Mr. Bradshaw, 50, said from an almond orchard here beginning to bloom. "Box after box after box are just empty. There's nobody home."
The sudden mysterious losses are highlighting the critical link that honeybees play in the long chain that gets fruit and vegetables to supermarkets and dinner tables across the country.
Beekeepers have fought regional bee crises before, but this is the first national affliction.
Now, in a mystery worthy of Agatha Christie, bees are flying off in search of pollen and nectar and simply never returning to their colonies. And nobody knows why. Researchers say the bees are presumably dying in the fields, perhaps becoming exhausted or simply disoriented and eventually falling victim to the cold.
As researchers scramble to find answers to the syndrome they have decided to call "colony collapse disorder," growers are becoming openly nervous about the capability of the commercial bee industry to meet the growing demand for bees to pollinate dozens of crops, from almonds to avocados to kiwis.
Along with recent stresses on the bees themselves, as well as on an industry increasingly under consolidation, some fear this disorder may force a breaking point for even large beekeepers.
A Cornell University study has estimated that honeybees annually pollinate more than $14 billion worth of seeds and crops in the United States, mostly fruits, vegetables and nuts. "Every third bite we consume in our diet is dependent on a honeybee to pollinate that food," said Zac Browning, vice president of the American Beekeeping Federation.
The bee losses are ranging from 30 to 60 percent on the West Coast, with some beekeepers on the East Coast and in Texas reporting losses of more than 70 percent; beekeepers consider a loss of up to 20 percent in the offseason to be normal.
Beekeepers are the nomads of the agriculture world, working in obscurity in their white protective suits and frequently trekking around the country with their insects packed into 18-wheelers, looking for pollination work.
Once the domain of hobbyists with a handful of backyard hives, beekeeping has become increasingly commercial and consolidated. Over the last two decades, the number of beehives, now estimated by the Agriculture Department to be 2.4 million, has dropped by a quarter and the number of beekeepers by half.
Pressure has been building on the bee industry. The costs to maintain hives, also known as colonies, are rising along with the strain on bees of being bred to pollinate rather than just make honey. And beekeepers are losing out to suburban sprawl in their quest for spots where bees can forage for nectar to stay healthy and strong during the pollination season.
"There are less beekeepers, less bees, yet more crops to pollinate," Mr. Browning said. "While this sounds sweet for the bee business, with so much added loss and expense due to disease, pests and higher equipment costs, profitability is actually falling."
Some 15 worried beekeepers convened in Florida this month to brainstorm with researchers how to cope with the extensive bee losses. Investigators are exploring a range of theories, including viruses, a fungus and poor bee nutrition.
They are also studying a group of pesticides that were banned in some European countries to see if they are somehow affecting bees' innate ability to find their way back home.
It could just be that the bees are stressed out. Bees are being raised to survive a shorter offseason, to be ready to pollinate once the almond bloom begins in February. That has most likely lowered their immunity to viruses.
Mites have also damaged bee colonies, and the insecticides used to try to kill mites are harming the ability of queen bees to spawn as many worker bees. The queens are living half as long as they did just a few years ago.
Researchers are also concerned that the willingness of beekeepers to truck their colonies from coast to coast could be adding to bees' stress, helping to spread viruses and mites and otherwise accelerating whatever is afflicting them.
Dennis van Engelsdorp, a bee specialist with the state of Pennsylvania who is part of the team studying the bee colony collapses, said the "strong immune suppression" investigators have observed "could be the AIDS of the bee industry," making bees more susceptible to other diseases that eventually kill them off.
Growers have tried before to do without bees. In past decades, they have used everything from giant blowers to helicopters to mortar shells to try to spread pollen across the plants. More recently researchers have been trying to develop "self-compatible" almond trees that will require fewer bees. One company is even trying to commercialize the blue orchard bee, which is virtually stingless and works at colder temperatures than the honeybee.
Beekeepers have endured two major mite infestations since the 1980s, which felled many hobbyist beekeepers, and three cases of unexplained disappearing disorders as far back as 1894. But those episodes were confined to small areas, Mr. van Engelsdorp said.
Today the industry is in a weaker position to deal with new stresses. A flood of imported honey from China and Argentina has depressed honey prices and put more pressure on beekeepers to take to the road in search of pollination contracts. Beekeepers are trucking tens of billions of bees around the country every year.
California's almond crop, by far the biggest in the world, now draws more than half of the country's bee colonies in February. The crop has been both a boon to commercial beekeeping and a burden, as pressure mounts for the industry to fill growing demand. Now spread over 580,000 acres stretched across 300 miles of California's Central Valley, the crop is expected to grow to 680,000 acres by 2010.
Beekeepers now earn many times more renting their bees out to pollinate crops than in producing honey. Two years ago a lack of bees for the California almond crop caused bee rental prices to jump, drawing beekeepers from the East Coast.
This year the price for a bee colony is about $135, up from $55 in 2004, said Joe Traynor, a bee broker in Bakersfield, Calif.
A typical bee colony ranges from 15,000 to 30,000 bees. But beekeepers' costs are also on the rise. In the past decade, fuel, equipment and even bee boxes have doubled and tripled in price.
The cost to control mites has also risen, along with the price of queen bees, which cost about $15 each, up from $10 three years ago.
To give bees energy while they are pollinating, beekeepers now feed them protein supplements and a liquid mix of sucrose and corn syrup carried in tanker-sized trucks costing $12,000 per load. Over all, Mr. Bradshaw figures, in recent years he has spent $145 a hive annually to keep his bees alive, for a profit of about $11 a hive, not including labor expenses. The last three years his net income has averaged $30,000 a year from his 4,200 bee colonies, he said.
"A couple of farmers have asked me, 'Why are you doing this?' " Mr. Bradshaw said. "I ask myself the same thing. But it is a job I like. It is a lifestyle. I work with my dad every day. And now my son is starting to work with us."
Almonds fetch the highest prices for bees, but if there aren't enough bees to go around, some growers may be forced to seek alternatives to bees or change their variety of trees.
"It would be nice to know that we have a dependable source of honey bees," said Martin Hein, an almond grower based in Visalia. "But at this point I don't know that we have that for the amount of acres we have got."
To cope with the losses, beekeepers have been scouring elsewhere for bees to fulfill their contracts with growers. Lance Sundberg, a beekeeper from Columbus, Mont., said he spent $150,000 in the last two weeks buying 1,000 packages of bees * amounting to 14 million bees * from Australia.
He is hoping the Aussie bees will help offset the loss of one-third of the 7,600 hives he manages in six states. "The fear is that when we mix the bees the die-offs will continue to occur," Mr. Sundberg said.
Migratory beekeeping is a lonely life that many compare to truck driving. Mr. Sundberg spends more than half the year driving 20 truckloads of bees around the country. In Terra Bella, an hour south of Visalia, Jack Brumley grimaced from inside his equipment shed as he watched Rosa Pati?o use a flat tool to scrape dried honey from dozens of beehive frames that once held bees. Some 2,000 empty boxes * which once held one-third of his total hives * were stacked to the roof.
Beekeepers must often plead with landowners to allow bees to be placed on their land to forage for nectar. One large citrus grower has pushed for California to institute a "no-fly zone" for bees of at least two miles to prevent them from pollinating a seedless form of Mandarin orange.
But the quality of forage might make a difference. Last week Mr. Bradshaw used a forklift to remove some of his bee colonies from a spot across a riverbed from orange groves. Only three of the 64 colonies there have died or disappeared.
"It will probably take me two to three more years to get back up," he said. "Unless I spend gobs of money I don't have."
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