What is a Carpenter Bee Trap?

Carpenter bee traps are really simple in design, and you can easily make one at your home from stuff you likely have in your garage. They are designed to attract, trap, and kill any carpenter bees that come into the area. They will not attract more carpenter bees to your backyard, but they will work wonders against the ones that would have wondered there anyways.

They will prevent these pesky little things from boring into any untreated, unpainted, and unprotected wood on your property. They do this by providing them with a much more appealing target, which is going to get the trap and killed.

These traps work by exploiting carpenter bees’ natural tendencies. They like to bore straight into any wood, but they prefer to use any natural openings. Once they are inside, they immediately turn at a right angle to protect themselves from natural predators like the woodpecker. These traps exploit this by being hollow on the inside. The bees will enter the hole, turn to a right angle, and find no natural tunnels. This will make them disoriented, and they will become trapped only to die shortly after.

Also Read: - Ways on How to Get Rid Of Carpenter Bees in Your House

How to Build a Carpenter Bee Trap

There are a lot of different ways to build an effective trap, but the basic design is pretty simple. You are going to want to build a box out of untreated and unpainted wood, preferably pine. This box is going to look sort of like an upside-down triangle, and you are going to drill a single hole towards the top of the front-facing panel. You might want to include a bit of bait like some sugar water.

The goal of the trap is to prevent the bees from being able to find that exit again, so do not make it too big. A good rule of thumb is to make the hole you drill no bigger than your index finger, but if you are skilled enough then you could make the hole get a bit narrower as it gets deeper. You may need to open and empty out the trap once every year. This is just the basic design; we highly recommend that you add at least one of the features below:

Fly Paper: If you line the bottom of your trap with some flypaper or even double-sided sticky tape then the carpenter bee trap will be much more effective. This is the easiest thing to do initially, but you will end up paying for it in time. You will technically have to reline the trap much more often than if you used an alternative method, and the smell of the adhesive might repel some of the carpenter bees.  This method will still be effective if the tape gets dry since it will keep the bees trapped until they die by preventing them from boring through the bottom.

Two Different Size Soda Bottles: This is highly effective, but it will take a little bit more skill as a carpenter to make this trap. This type of trap involves making an upside-down triangle trap out of pine-like the one described above, but the bottom of the trap should be flat. The bottom of the wooden part of the trap should only be as wide and deep as the center portion of a soda bottle.

You are going cut the smaller sized soda bottles in half and cut off a little bit off the top where the cap would go (to make it a little bit wider). This is going to act as a funnel. You are going to cut a hole in the bottom of the trap as wide as the wide portion of the smaller bottle, and attach it so it gets narrower as it goes down. Finally, take the larger bottle and cut off the top portion, leaving enough room to completely cover the small bottle (the funnel). You can use glue to attach these plastic parts to the wood.

Tips to Make Them More Effective

There are a few things you can do to make your traps more effective. The first is to prevent or “harden” any other wood that you have on your property. The goal is to make your trap the most appetizing piece of wood on your property. The easiest way to do this would be to simply paint or seal any wood that is lying around.

Trap wise it is important to keep a little bit of sugar water in the trap.  This will go a long way in making them want to go in for a visit, and as weird as it sounds there is one more thing you could do.  When you are emptying the trap, and then leave some of the fresher bodies around. The smell of dead carpenter bees attracts more…

Buying a Trap

There are a lot of options in buying carpenter bee traps, but there are a few things to keep in mind.  The trap should be reusable, without the need to refill any poison or sticky tape. These are just gimmicks to get you to keep buying more of their stuff. The best traps are simple, and of course, made out of wood.  Do not buy anything that is made out of plastic. For more info about carpenter bee traps, call Bee and Wasp Control Brisbane professionals.