I finally had a chance to mount up some Carpenter Bee traps that I purchased as part of a neighborhood group buy - these came from a discussion on the Northcrest i-neighbors group (if you haven't heard about this group, it's a web-based community hosted by the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania an is free with no advertising. There are about 200 Northcrest neighbors signed up and it's used to communicate neighborhood issues, etc., especially by the Neighborhood Watch and other associations. Links at the bottom of this post). In any case, Chris Sommovigo posted this site (
http://www.carpenterbeesolutions.com/) and after viewing the videos about 10 of us got together and purchased the Carpenter Bee traps and "Bee Butter" (order was put together by Marty Levine - you can see the original post on i-neighbors here:
http://www.i-neighbors.org/discussion_thread.php?id=167751).
So I got two of these traps and mounted them on the Southern eave of my roof (I had sprayed the front, back and carport last year and they were still holding up well - the Southern eave is above a slope that cants down and left so it's harder to place a ladder so I was slack about spraying that end - this year there were bees everywhere, but that end got riddled with holes).
So this is what the trap looks like mounted - I used two short galvanized finishing nails (one on each side) - the website suggest covering one of the bee holes so I found one that looked active in the middle of about a dozen. I put one trap on each side of the eave, about 10 feet from the ends.
The first day I didn't see anything in there, nor the second so I stopped watching. Towards the end of the week I noticed somehing in one but it was hard to see how many were caught. This past weekend I got out the ladder and this is what was in the bottle:
So 11 bees - not bad for a test run. These were in the trap near the back of the house - the other trap got bupkis. These look soggy as it had rained - I drilled a couple of holes in the bottom of the trap (as suggested by the video so yes, you should also do this if you're going to use them).
In all not a bad idea and it works for sure.
To join Northcrest i-neighbors:
http://www.i-neighbors.org/30340/Northcrest
-- John
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