LESLIE: Sherry in Indiana is joining us at The Money Pit with an issue with bees. I hope you are not getting stung. What’s going on?
SHERRY: I have a problem with big bumblebees.
TOM: OK.
LESLIE: Are they big with like large, black rear ends?
SHERRY: Yes.
TOM: And do they have toolbelts strapped to their sides? (Leslie chuckles)
SHERRY: Right. (chuckles)
TOM: Because you may be talking about carpenter bees, seriously. Do they leave big holes in your like wood?
SHERRY: Yes, they do.
TOM: Yeah. Those are …
LESLIE: (overlapping voices) Yeah, those are carpenter bees.
TOM: Yep, that’s carpenter bee. And they can be kind of annoying. What you need to know about them …
LESLIE: Well, and frightening, actually.
TOM: Yeah, they are frightening. Well, they’re designed to scare you because they can’t bite you and that’s not something that you would expect looking at a big bee like that.
LESLIE: Yeah, and they can’t bite you but they can actually eat every piece of wood and like bore these perfect 3/8-inch holes into your fascia board or garage doors or trimming around the exterior of your house and just, you know, live in there. They love it.
TOM: Yep. So your options, Sherry, are to have them professionally treated and make sure you fill the holes. And if you don’t want to do that, what we did at – we had a real bad carpenter bee problem – I actually replaced all of the fascia on my garage with AZEK, which is a cellular PVC; so it’s not wood. And it was really funny because after I did that, the bees kept swarming around the AZEK and they were like …
LESLIE: Trying to figure it out?
TOM: Like, “Well, it looks like wood but it doesn’t taste right.” You know? And it worked and they never came back after that. So you either have to have it treated regularly or you have to replace it with something that they’re not going to eat.
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