They want to eat my log cabin. I went to WalMart today and bought two badminton racquets. You can get better racquet speed with the badminton than with the tennis racquet.

I got 9 of 'em today, can't recover all the corpses. May get a few more before sunset.

My new hobby has become sitting on the porch in the evenings with a cold Bud Light in one hand, and a Ruger Single Six loaded with rat shot in the other. I have shot up a lot of it in the last 3 weeks, missed quite a few, but the little fuggers better not do much hovering. It is actually fun as sheit.

Are you using the shot shells that are like a little brass shotgun shell, with the case opening to let the shot out?

Sitting here right now as a matter of fact.

Killed 4 today with my Bug A-Salt gun.

upload an image

bee skeet

Hate them bastids. They burrowed their way through an exterior wall of my house and set up residence. It took a few days To clear them out but i got them noisy buggers.

I just got 7 more in 7 minutes. Sunset slaughter of carpenter bees.

We have a log house too. They’re all over the place come summer.
Wifey saw on Facebook or somewhere about hanging a paper bag up, shaping it like a hornets nest. Yeah, right, I thought.
But after we’d done that I saw very few!?
Give it a shot. I was surprised.
7mm

Bug A-Salt gun
This is the most fun you can have. Been wearing them out on my deck for a couple of weeks now.

One of my farmer buddies says please don't kill them, we need them to pollinate.

I told him that if he'd furnish me with a a dozen 10' 2x6's & a box of nails I'd hold off . He didn't come thru. A pole barn I have will eventually need serious repair if I don't keep them down.

The badminton raquet is probably the cheapest. I've shot several dollars worth of 22 shotshells trying to slow them down.

Kill one of the suckers & 10 will come to it's funeral.

Broom handle is more sporting.

Half inch PVC pipe.

It's the sport of it. 😁

Hahaha. Unreal.

I load my own .45 Colt shot shells. 2-3 grains of Bullseye, a card wad over the powder, fill the case to the top with #9 shot and top with a .45 caliber gas check, then give it a pretty good roll crimp. My 6" Ruger Blackhawk loves 'em!
Jerry

Google “carpenter bee trap”

Thanks for the recipe, I'm gonna try that.

I see there are many different models of Bug a Salt guns. I see him shooting flies.
What model do y'all use on carpenter bees? What kind of salt do you use?

Bee skeet is fun and the Single Six is my preference but when you can't be there these work great.

https://www.hgtv.com/outdoors/gardens/planting-and-maintenance/make-a-homemade-carpenter-bee-trap

They are bad this year. Never remember seeing so many.

Yep.

Not to hard to build.

Probably around 30 carcasses in mine.

A piece of hardware cloth stapled to a dowel works. Badminton racket probably faster handling.

DF

I got rid of all the cypress on my house last summer and that slowed the bee sighting a lot.
This was my fun gun for bee shooting,
https://shop.whittakerguns.com/product/2427179
Ronnie

Good ole Daisy red rider and a cold beverage! I shootem about twice a day! Best so far is 3 in a row

That is some of what they have left for luger around here.
Smaller boxes tho
Nothing else seems to work, plastic, flashing, filling the holes with goo if you can find em. Even tried nails/screws at the hole entrance at night when they are inside...

I be likin' .22 rat shot, crimped not in a capsule. Would give my left ring finger for a smoothbore .22 pump rifle.....

My Mom bought a house next to ours in 2005. When she bought it, it was in need of a lot of repairs. The roof over the back stoop had been varnished about 60 years prior and all the varnish underneath had fallen off, giving the Carpenter Bees a wonderland for decades. I fought those things all spring, and then got to the repairs on the stoop in 2006. I lost count how many of their bore holes I filled with wood putty, and then a couple coats of exterior paint later, the bees had no place to bore holes. To this day, I have those bees coming to check out their old stomping grounds every year. I saw one today looking for a place to bore a hole. All I can figure is they pass on information from generation to generation, or it is somehow passed on through genes. I hate what they do , but it is amazing after all these years they remember their old breeding area.

I just spent over a 100 bucks at Midway for some upgraded ammo. 11 pounds of #12 shot, some 451 gas checks, and overwad cards. Hotrod Lincoln is to blame. I'm gonna really shwack em next week. 😁

I've used home-made traps the last few years. I put up 9 traps around my house when the bees show up for a few weeks. The last time I took down the traps, I counted 128 bees total from the 9 traps.

I've got them in my barn. For the last few years I've been using crushed walnut hull polishing media... the stuff from my case polisher. I can shoot them inside the barn and it doesn't cause any damage. 10' is about my maximum effective range.
My best day has been 16 for 18 shots. Look forward to it every year... it's a hoot!

11lbs of shot should last awhile,lol.

I got 3 of them things I bought from the Co-Op, as soon as my sheit get's here, I'm gonna load up some magnum 45 Colt loads and blow em off the eaves. Anybody got some .460 brass I can have? 😁😁

I got 3 of them things I bought from the Co-Op, as soon as my sheit get's here, I'm gonna load up some magnum 45 Colt loads and blow em off the eaves. Anybody got some .460 brass I can have? 😁😁

Recently finished and installed 4 home made traps. They've been hard on my shed for years. I did the badminton racket for years and wanted to try something different.

Ya'll think I'm kidding, this sheit is gonna get serious now. 😁😁😁

What are you loading the walnut in?

Seems like a good use for a .410 Judge..

I had a pump house for the swimming pool in the backyard. Wood framed of course and each spring I would fight the carpenter bees.

My weapon of choice is the badmitton racket. As someone mentioned you get better speed with it, as a kid we used plastic baseball bats.

This year my best day on the beefields was 64, add 3 days together and it was over 100 bees. The ground was covered in bee bodies.

I had been planning to tear down the pump house as I filled in the swimming pool years ago. A neighbor wanted the metal siding and roof, so I let him
tear it down for the material. We were killing bees nonstop, de nailed the wood and piled the bad pieces up and burned it. I think I heard the bees screaming.
For the next 3 days or so, you could walk where the pump house stood and get buzzed by a pissed off carpenter bee. A few more died in the flybys.

I had used bee traps I had built for a couple of years and caught a bunch of bees that way. I think you need a multi-pronged approach to get rid of carpenter bees.

Some of the wood we tore down would split open and was riddled with tunnel chambers so bad it had no strength.

You will never stop the cycle of bees from year to year unless you take the wood down and out a piece someplace out of sight and let the bees have it. I fought them for years on my wooden decks.
My weapon on choice was a racquetball racquet, you gotta be quick!

Back in 2002, it was the first spring I'd been at the farm. I would sit out back in the evening and the wood bees would be almost intolerable. There were a lot of them, and they were overly aggressive. They don't sting, but they'll head-butt you like they mean it. I was constantly getting Kamikaze hits off my glasses. The first night, I came close to taking action, but I held back because I had already had some scotch. The next night, I held off Happy Hour. I had a single-shot 12 GA shotgun with a full choke and what was left of a case of cheap Yugoslavian Skeet loads.

Wood bees will hover for a moment on the edge of the gutter, the roof line, or a tall dandelion. You have to be quick, but the target is stationary. Pretty soon, I was up to nailing a bee with every 2nd shot or so. By the time I was out of ammo, I was pretty good. My best was the one I nailed just off the peak of the roof. He bounced down the shingles and fell into my open hand-- decapitated.

The next weekend, KYHillChick came out and inspected the carnage around the Thoughtful Spot. There were craters in the grass along with empty hulls all over the backyard. She was certain I'd gone 'round the bend. However, the wood bee problem was fixed and fixed permanently. It's now 2020, and we may get one or two wood bees a season at the Thoughtful Spot, but nothing like the dozens that were there when we moved in.

Traps work well. Had one trap get about 45 several years ago. That was over the summer. Trick is to kill a few and put them in the container. The live bees smell carpenter bee and come on in never to leave. It as fun as shooting them and not as rewarding as hearing that Thud when you connect with a badminton racquet but very effective.

The problem is not so much the bees boring holes as it is the woodpeckers tearing apart the structure to get at the bees.


Mike

They've infested my tool shed, and it seems like the more you kill, the more that take their place. I use a badmitton racket, and am now on the last one out of a set of four that we bought years ago. Yesterday afternoon, I killed 10 in one spot without ever moving. Have probably killed 50 already this year. I really should be spraying the bastids and not letting them do their dirty work.

As to pollinating crops, yes they do, and that is the main reason I've never sprayed them.

I [bleep] them with my pellet gun, pump it up with no pellets. The blast of air would blow them to pieces.

The hard way, IN FLIGHT. Not a very good kill ratio, but it's fun and improves one's wing shooting!

i use a pellet gun or a boat paddle

I live in a clear redwood sided house those 1x8 t&g boards are expensive! I HATE CARPENTER BEES!

Spray with Fipronil containing insecticides. Kills em dead!

One of last years bee hunts. Fun for an hour or so. Expensive ammo though.

Never got around to building traps. Need to do that and get a couple badminton rackets. Also want to get some shot and try rolling my own.

I dont like the CCI's with the shot cup. I haven't patterned the shot, but my success rate really goes down when shooting at the carpenter bees. I prefer the Federal that has the crimped end. Just guessing, but probably kill twice as many with the Federal. I'm shooting a cheap Heritage with a 6" barrel.

I had never seen this kind of bee until I was visiting my son in Missouri last year. There were hundreds around his house. I found a box of 22 shot shells, the crimped kind, and a Ruger 22/45 in the kitchen and went to work. Great fun. At close enough range they’d just disappear with wings and a few pieces floating down.

I've got a couple of the traps out, and while they do catch a few, they don't make a dent in the population.

A shot of WD40 in the hole when you know they're in there takes care of them.

I load 357 using wads cut from the styrofoam trays that steaks are packaged on. Use the mouth of a fired casing to cut the wads. Sometimes I'll put a light wipe of silicone caulking on the overshot wad. I need to load some in 44s to see if that works any better.
I've got a 45/410 Contender barrel, I might load a few rounds with walnut hulls instead of shot and with the petals cut off of the wads... might become my long range load for pass shooting. Lol

Shooting a pellet gun without a pellet can ruin it.

That's a classic fu ck ing picture right there.

Take a dead one and hang it from a string over a patio and it'll draw in others

Hang some kinda small to med. size paper bags stuffed with something to make them a full shape with a length of string under porches and eves. They llok like hornets nest and keep carpenter bees away. They have worked pretty good for me for 3 years now.

How is this for a fake hornet nest? I just hung it up 5 minutes ago.
Sounds just crazy enough to work. Damn, am I sick of the bees and the woodpeckers messing up my house.

Used to have a patio roof made out of logs, and the carpenter bees liked to burrow into the logs. After a year or two looking at a couple holes they had made just over the patio door, I decided to do something about it. When they returned that year, I waited until one went into the burrow, and I put a cork into the hole. Thought I was done with that, but then pretty soon I could see the cork slightly moving, and I put 2 and 2 together. So, I got a drill with a small bit, drilled a small hole through the center of the cork, stuck a thin spray can tube into the hole, and sprayed wd40 into it. Waited a while, and when I pulled out the cork, about half the effing thing was eaten away. Danged carpenter bee was making great headway into eating her way out of my trap.

No more bees used that burrow after that.

i used aerosol bee killer for two years, got rid of them but they still returned for a few years after that

Cool. I'm going tomorrow to get one of those, too.

Scratch that. Just ordered one off Amazon for $9.97, free shipping.

Looks more real than ours! we just stuffed a medium size paper bag with balls of newspaper to hold the shape, tied the top shut and hung it on the porch.
I think one of her friends on Facebook suggested this. Like I said I was more than skeptical, but thought “well hell, it don’t cost nothing”.
I was very surprised. Even on the other side of the house the damn bees stayed away. My badminton racket layed dormant.
Let us know in a month or so, but I’ll be surprised if it doesn’t cut them down by 75% or more.
7mm

Cool idea. May have to try that.

DF

I went to the University of YouTube this morning to see how to build a trap. Real easy to make out of a 6" long 4x4 and an empty jar. We'll see how it works when the little buggers return.
My neighbor swears by the paper bag method.

HOLY Cow! 65.00 for gas checks?!!!
is that per 1000?
if so I am sitting on a gold mine in my attic. had 2 cases of 10 boxes of 1000 when I closed my shop so I kept them. have used one box.

I don't need no kung fu flu money, I can jump start the economy just selling gas checks!

Yep, per 1K. They only had one box of any brand, I needed em any way. Every once in a while you just gotta take your fuqkin

but as for the bees I used a tennis racket that was battery powered. swat, sizzle, squeak, and done. well done if you held down the button. had a buddy saw me using it on flies wanted to know how powerful it was. stuck his tongue on it and burned a tic tac to game on this tongue.
he's a good guy but not too brite!

After reading this thread, and posting on it, earlier today, I sent my son a link to the salt gun outfit, suggested it might be a good way to shoot his carpenter bees. He sent me back a video of my grandson shooting them down with a salt gun. Seems like he's always one step ahead of me.

It's a simple thing to make a set of punch dies and make gas checks out of soft drink or beer cans. With a little practice at getting the right spacing, I can get 40 or so from each can. After emptying a 6-pack or three for raw material, my work does get a little sloppy, though!
Jerry

There are several different models of the salt gun. The little one for flies doesn't look to good for the mighty Carpenter Bee.
Which model are y'all killing bees with?

Tried some 12 ga 7 1/2 field loads today. More fun than it should have been!

Also, tried some 22 shot shells and they worked just fine too.

As far as the fun-o-meter goes, beats the C^^^p out of spraying them with insecticide!

I face a bigger problem than most of y'all boys. I have a lot of wood for the carpenter bees to chew up, and their buddies the woodpeckers.
There is a log cabin here in Madison County that I have seen that was torn up by woodpeckers, there were holes and gouges, 3 foot long and 8 inches high.
So I have been battling carpenter bees for 24 years. I have 3 of the traps and they kill a lot of bees. I have killed some with the Single Six and that is fun!
And I have slaughtered them with the badminton racquet, on one day, ten years ago I killed 74 of 'em. I have gotten some damage from the woodpeckers, they made a hole 2 inches wide and a foot high in a post, and in a collar tie they made a hole 14 inches long and 3 inches high. Thank God for some reason they stay away from my logs.

And several of y'all said that a paper bag would run them off. I have some plastic horned owls, now it makes sense that the woodpecker would be scared of the horned owl and these plastic owls do a pretty good job of running off the birds.
But that a little bug would know that the paper wasps are an enemy, and would stay away from a fake paper wasp hive, that was hard to believe.




So I tried it anyway. I stapled this bag up 3 days ago. Normally, a sunny April day and 70 degrees, I would have about 80 carpenter bees. Just went outside, I saw one bee and I killed him with the racquet. Now there are no bees. This paper bag works!

Our place is in Mitchell county and I have yet seen one there. Not there much in the spring though.

Like I said, when Penny brought it up, I thought “oh sure.. this is bound to work”!
Glad it’s working for you. Let me know how that Kobalt mower is working out. I’m thinking pretty hard about it.
7mm

Hornets are hell on carpenter bees, when I pulled all the cypress off the house last year hornets were in the Bee tunnels, I’m guessing they were after the nests.
Ronnie