We are infested.

(We are still talking about July 4th weekend, even though I know that we are now on the next weekend.) After the Korean BBQ dinner (or maybe the next day), I was walking down the steps of our deck (which I do at least every other day) to take the compost out to the composter when I spy a series of holes on the handrail…

DSC_0171

My first thought was THOSE *&^% KIDS have been taking a hammer to the deck! I’m going to kick their little behinds when I catch them. And then I see:

DSC_0172

Argh! Someone is eating the house! I just about fainted. So we call in the neighborhood pest control who tell me that it’s carpenter ants and bees that are destroying the deck. As I told Jeremy, this is the trifecta of things I hate! Pesticides, bugs and home repair. I asked all the neighborhood homeowners and hear countless stories of termite/carpenter ants/carpenter bee infestations – there is so much to learn as a homeowner. Being a grown up means that instead of spending your money on cool stuff, you get to spend hard earned money on pesticides. Sigh.

I spent a lot of time today learning about bugs. Apparently the actual hole that you see here:

DSC_0168

is caused by a woodpecker who sees the bee going in and out of a small hole underneath the wood board. The woodpecker knows that the carpenter bee is going to lay some yummy larvae in the wood, so then the woodpecker just perches there and bangs away until he gets to the savory morsel.

4 thoughts on “We are infested.”

  1. oh man, I can relate. We have carpenter ants and wasps. The deck is crumbling before our eyes (you can actually fall through in some spots). We are praying that in the next month we can pull it out and put in a cement patio – there aren't any pests that eat cement are there?? We actually have wasps coming into the house now too, we're looking for the nest and I'm pretty sure I'm going to pass out when we find it, it's gotta be huge! The woodpecker thing we don't have though, that thing looks destructive. I cringe at the sight of pesticides but I totally understand it now…. Unfortunatly. Good luck!

  2. Use some wood filler to fill those holes. They did not use treated wood. If getting worse, replace those with treated wood. No big deal. Take it easy.

    Go to Lowis and buy something for ants. It works. We had lots of ants at home. I used many non-chemical stuffs such as garlic to keep them away. But it did not work. Finally I went Lowis spent $5.00 and it worked very well.

  3. Well, I guess the wood was not treated. Replace it with treated wood. I will throw away those decomposed pile stuff. It attracts a lot of ??? When applying chemical, make sure fence out using yellow ribbons (Lowes) several days so kids will not play close to it.

    Need to have termite inspection regularly.

  4. Whoa! Those are some big holes. Here in Tejas they say "either you have termites, hd termites or are gonna have termites" We were swarmed several springs in a row. So, we had to finally break down and spend some $$$$ that came with a guarantee.

Leave a Reply to DorisCancel reply