Bees & Wasps
Advanced Pest Control Pest Library
Pest Library
Bees & Wasps
The Caribbean is home to many essential bees that our vital to crops and our environment. Unfortunately, many bees like to make their nests in your home, outside the home, in your yard, on your tree and ultimately be dangerous to you, your family, and pets. Bees will attack when they feel threatened, and can be deadly to those allergic to their venom. Here at Advanced Pest Control, we offer a couple of different services to help get rid of bees with Natural Pest Control methods, Live bee removals, along with bee hive relocation.
Places Bees Love to Nest
- Abandoned vehicles
- Old tires
- Trees
- Garages
- Outbuildings
- Sheds
- Walls
- Crawl spaces under houses or buildings
- Empty containers
- Places with holes
- Fences
- Lumber piles
- Manholes
- Water meters
- Utility infrastructures
Carpenter Bees
Carpenter bees get their name from their ability to drill through wood and nest in it. Their drilling will create a nearly perfect hole approximately 1/2 inch in diameter. You will see round holes and a coarse sawdust-like substance called frass underneath the holes. The holes are perfectly round and are about 3/8 inch in diameter. You may find old holes near the newer ones. Old nests can be used year after year by the carpenter bee. Their holes are usually located on the underside of any wood surface including siding, soffits, overhangs, decks, fence posts, fascia boards and window frames.
The males seek out the females, hovering around females that found some unfinished wood, such as under eaves, railings, etc. The males are territorial and will confront you if you enter their territory, but they are incapable of stinging. Females have a stinger, but are very docile. Females will nest in all types of wood, but prefer weathered and unpainted wood.
Male carpenter bees tend to be territorial and can buzz around you if you approach closely, sometimes hovering a short distance in front of your face or buzzing around your head. Since males have no stinger, these actions are just for show and intimidation.
The female bee can squeeze through incredibly tiny places to bore into untreated wood
Honey Bees
There are three members of a honey bee colony:
- Queen – mother to all the bees in the colony; she is a fertile female.
- Worker – an infertile female that performs the labor tasks of the colony, including feed preparation, guarding the hive, feeding the queens, drones and brood, and heating and cooling the hive.
- Drone – the male that starts out as an unfertilized egg. Its only purpose in the colony is to mate with a virgin queen. They live to mate with the queen, but not more than one in thousand get the opportunity to mate.
On average, a worker bee in the summer lasts six to eight weeks. Their most common cause of death is wearing their wings out. During that six to eight-week period, their average honey production is 1/12 of a teaspoon. In that short lifetime, they fly the equivalent of 1 1/2 times the circumference of the earth.