Carpenter Bees and other downsides to spring
Posted by Bill on Mar 23 2007 at 04:04 pm | Tagged as: The Barn, Pasture
It’s been in the 70’s and low 80’s all week, a sure sign that spring is on the way. I love spring but there a few things I’m not looking forward to. The first has got to be carpenter bees. I mentioned carpenter bees last year, when I noticed how much damage they were doing to our wooden barn and wood-sided house. Upon further inspection this year, we quickly realized that carpenter bees have destroyed a significant number of important beams in the old barn in the pasture. We’re going to have to replace those this year or risk losing the barn. It’s that serious. You’ll recall that carpenter bees don’t just drill large holes in wood, they burrow up to 10 feet into the wood. We treated the burrows we could reach last year with Sevin dust and sealed up a good many of them with expanding foam. Yeah, wood filler would have been better but we had a LOT of holes. The expanding foam seemed more economical. And easier.
Walking around outside today, I can tell you I must not have made too big an impact on the carpenter bee population because they are everywhere! I’m not sure what to do about the ones in the air besides what some call “carpenter bee tennis,” but I’m back to treating the holes I can find with Sevin dust. I’m worried about places I can’t see or easily get to like 25 feet up in the rafters of the barn, under our deck or behind the wood siding of our house. Stupid carpenter bees.
Another related downside to spring is wasps. Our barn serves as an ideal wasp nest host, with crevices all over, including lots of hidden ones. Last year there were days where we just didn’t want to hang out at the barn much due to all the aggressive wasps. I made some wasp traps with nectar attractant, the kind that are easy to get into but hard to get out of, but the wasps totally ignored it. We diligently knocked down or treated wasp nests as we found them and there were no incidents with our horses. But now I’m back on wasp patrol. Any suggestions are welcome.
Flies - they’re coming soon. I’ve seen some but when you have horses, you’ll have flies and lots of them. We were successful last year with fly parasites from Arbico Organics (there are lots of companies that sell them). Have you seen these? You subscribe to a monthly service that send fly parasite larvae. They hatch and destroy flies in some kind of gruesome way. We were skeptical but proved last year they really do work. We wrote last May about what fly treatment methods we were trying. It’s time to think about what we’re going to use this year.
Thorns and other weeds - We’re excited about the grass growing. Our horses seem seriously tired of dry hay and I don’t blame them. But the return of grass means the weeds and thorn bushes are also returning. Time to get out into the pasture to uproot the thorn vines. We also need to stay on top of keeping the pasture trimmed/bush-hogged. Apparently if you don’t keep your grass trimmed, the weeds choke out the good stuff.
Snakes - Mikki wrote last year about a snake that visited our barn and freaked us all out. I hate snakes! They creep me out. Yes I know, they provide the valuable service of getting rid of mice and rats but I’d still rather have barn cats.
Other than those things, we’re VERY MUCH looking forward to spring. I’ll take warm weather with these downsides any day over 20 degrees and windy.
I’ve used fly predators for years. I swear by them. Between using fly predators and keeping my manure pile covered with a tarp, I’m able to keep the flies down to pratically nothing. Considering I have 27 horses on small acreage that’s quite a feat.
If you use them regularly you can build up a recurrant population (except in extreme winters) that carries over and within a two or three seasons with mild winters have an adequate population to cover your needs (provided you don’t increase the size of your herd.
Welcome to the midwest! Last week it got into the 90’s in AZ and we had to watch out for SNAKES everywhere. At least you probably don’t have rattlers.
risingrainbow, we plan on using fly predators again this year because they really did seem to work well last year. I don’t cover our manure pile but that makes sense. And with 27 horses you should know!
We’ve been in the mid to upper 80’s here this week in east Tennessee. I have yet to see a snake but when I do, you’ll hear about it. Few things creep me out as much. I was just talking with a neighbor about it today. He said one of our neighbors killed a rattlesnake a few years ago. Cottonmouth, rattlesnake, gartersnake…I won’t be getting within 10 feet of one by choice.