LESLIE: Frank in North Carolina is dealing with carpenter bees. Tell us about the problem.
FRANK: Well, I was walking around the outside of my house one afternoon and all of a sudden I was buzzed by about six or seven of these – they looked like …
LESLIE: Giant monsters? (Tom and Frank chuckle)
TOM: They’re like low-flying attack helicopters, aren’t they?
FRANK: Attack helicopters. And I don’t know, some people said they really are bumblebees but I call them carpenter bees.
TOM: Yeah.
LESLIE: Well, the carpenter bee has the black bottom. Correct, Tom?
TOM: Yeah. And you know, the thing is – you know why they’re so aggressive? Because they can’t bite.
FRANK: They can’t bite?
TOM: They can’t sting you. No.
FRANK: They’ve never stung me and I …
TOM: Right, they can’t. They’re physically unable to do that, so they just kind of freak you out by like flying around your face. What they’ll do is they’ll drill up in the fascia and the soffits and the soft wood around the house. And they’ll go in across the grain then they’ll go with the grain, sort of deep in for a few inches, and lay eggs. And they can be tough.
You know, we’ve had carpenter bees on fascia areas around my house and …
LESLIE: We have them on soffits all the time.
TOM: And eventually I just tore out the wood fascia and replaced it with AZEK, which is a PVC – extruded PVC trim product.
FRANK: What is that? A …?
TOM: A-Z-E-K. It looks just like 1×6 wood fascia but it’s made out of plastic and it’s incredibly durable stuff; not that expensive.
LESLIE: And they don’t like to eat it.
TOM: They hate it. Yeah. When I first put it up, the bees would swarm around it and I could just see that they’re going, “Hmm, looks like wood. Doesn’t take like wood.” (Leslie chuckles)
FRANK: “It must not be wood.”
TOM: Yeah. So I mean you can treat them, you can spray for them, but they end up coming back every year, so I just gave up and just went with the AZEK and it worked great.
FRANK: Well, thank you very much for your help.
TOM: You’re welcome, Frank. Thanks so much for calling us at 888-MONEY-PIT.
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