CSB and the Carpenter Bees

Who ever wrote that “structural damage is generally minor or nonexistent” in the Wikipedia article about carpenter bees has not seen CSB on the roof with a badminton racquet. There is a reason gentlemen over 2 meters tall should not be roofers. Call it the tipping point. (But give them a lightweight racquet and they become weapons of mass destruction.)
Our carpenter bees, Xylocopa virginica, are larger than hummingbirds, hairier than woolly mammoths and just as annoying as the woodchuck in the vegetable garden. They make their nests by tunneling into wood, preferably the wood of our front porch, or the facia of the potting shed, or the underside of the shutters. Their tunneling technique – their large hairy bodies vibrate as they rasp their mandibles against the tender wood – results in telltale piles of sawdust falling to the ground and staining the clapboard. They also leave pollen skid marks under their tunnels. There is nothing subtle about a carpenter bee, or her depredations.
But what to do?
Years ago I was told to spray something toxic into the tunnels (assuming I could reach them) and then stuff in a wooden dowel (about 16 millimeters in diameter) to seal off the tunnel. My carpenter bees regarded this as afternoon tea. Recently it was suggested that we stuff steel wool into their excavations. But then the steel wool rusts and we end up with rust stains on the clapboard. There are also toxic bombs you can explode or drop onto the bees, and anything else in the vicinity, including the dogs, our own blessed honeybees, and us.
The ever-intrepid CSB has another technique. He swats the carpenter bees with a badminton racquet. I have tried this method with zero success, but he swears by it. In order to illustrate the potential deadliness of a swat with a badminton racquet, CSB points out that while the fastest a tennis ball has ever traveled is 156 mph, the fastest recorded shuttlecock speed was Fu Haifang’s 206 mph smash. On the lawn or the front porch this technique (Standing statue-still to ‘fool’ the bees, then lurching and swatting) may look silly but at least no human lives hang in the balance. This is not true on the roof, on the pitched roof, on the small pitched roof of the bay window.

The sport of badminton was invented in the 18th century by British officers stationed in Poona, India. Previous to these researches the only time I had every heard of Poona, or Pune, was as the venue of amazing erotic sculptures and reliefs, featuring the Hindu gods performing every manner of sex act you have ever heard of, and then some. * The game came back to England with the military, and was popular with the upper classes; think green lawns, long skirts, and shuttlecocks (“a feathered projectile with unique aerodynamic properties”). Until now, it has not been touted as a qualification for a career in extermination.


*And then upon further research I learned that I was completely wrong about that. How could I have been so mistaken? (The possibilities are myriad.) The famous erotic statues are in
Khajuraho, some 735 miles from Pune. But if you want to associate the birthplace of badminton with artistic sex scenes, I think that would be lovely.

How many shears?

Last weekend we cleaned out the potting shed. The potting shed, theoretically, is a thing of beauty. It is an old old building though I couldn't tell you if it is older than the house, which is quite old indeed. It is half subterranean, with stone walls rising chthonically from below to wooden beams and a lovely slate roof; the wooden frame and beams are, alas, of great interest to the carpenter bees, my nemeses in this season as they hover just out of reach and taunt me.
But it is not my intention to either extol the potting shed or castigate the carpenter bees, much as either task seems appealing just now. No, because in the course of cleaning out the potting shed - removing every last thing from its dark hidden depths, disturbing the cobwebs and spider sacs - we found six pairs of hedge shears.
No one needs six pairs of hedge shears. And least of all we with our minimal hedges and less inclination to trim them.They all have rust, but the degree of rust varies. Two have hardwood handles. One is the Ames Miracle. One has TFE coated blades. One is a Fiskars Power-Lever 10-incher and that is the rustiest of all. The Green Thumb Power Lever is supposed to increase your cutting power without requiring extra effort. And maybe that is what happened long ago when the shears were new.Maybe that could happen still if the blades were not rusted.
Even in their prime, not one of these hedge shears were of the professional grade needed for topiaries.
It is highly likely the hedges will remain unsheared.