Round Holes in Your Pergola? Carpenter Bees Start Early

Is it carpenter bees? How to read the holes

Carpenter bee holes are easy to tell apart once you know what to look for:

• The hole is round and clean-edged, as if someone drilled it, usually on the underside of a beam or board.
• The tunnel turns. Look in with a flashlight and you'll see it go in a short way, then turn and run along the grain.
• Sawdust underneath. Coarse, pale sawdust on the ground or the patio furniture under the hole.
• Yellowish stains streaking down the wood below the hole.
• Big bees hovering. They look like bumble bees, but the top of the abdomen is shiny and mostly bare. Males hover and dive at people but can't sting. Females can sting but rarely do.

Carpenter bees don't eat the wood. They chew it out to make a nest: a tunnel with a short row of cells, each holding one egg and a supply of pollen. The same gallery can be reused and lengthened year after year. Our carpenter bee page has photos and look-alikes.

When are carpenter bees active in Florida?

Most guides online are written for places with real winters, where carpenter bees show up in spring. Here they're around most of the year. The drilling picks up in late winter and spring, often with a second round in summer. In practice, the first fresh sawdust of the year can show up while much of the country is still cold. Our South Florida pest calendar shows where that falls next to everything else.

What we do about carpenter bee holes

Carpenter bees are pollinators, so we treat only where they're damaging the home. We treat the nest galleries in the wood with products labeled for carpenter bees. We don't treat flowering plants, shrubs or trees. Once activity stops, the holes should be plugged and sealed so they aren't reused. Your technician will tell you when it's time. Keep kids and pets off treated areas until dry, and follow your technician's instructions.

After that, painting or sealing bare wood makes it much less attractive to the next bees. We don't repair wood. If a beam or fascia board is badly tunneled, that's a job for a carpenter.

One more note: carpenter bees aren't one of the wood-destroying organisms Florida law lists, so this is regular pest work. Carpenter bee treatment is part of our wasp nest removal service, and it's priced after the FREE inspection. If what you're seeing turns out to be honey bees in a wall or a swarm on a branch, that's different. We don't remove honey bees or hives. Here's who to call for wasps or honey bees.

For general pests, our plan is $125 per quarter, about $42 a month, and monthly or custom schedules are quoted after the inspection. For plan customers: "If pests come back between visits, so do we, at no extra cost." There are no long-term contracts and no cancellation fees, just a simple service agreement. We're family-run and licensed, with 30+ years in the business, and hablamos español. See all stinging insects, or browse more guides.

Carpenter bee questions