Carpenter Bee Control

Carpenter bees pick the same targets across Ashburn every spring: the aging cedar and pine deck railings behind the 1990s homes in Ashburn Farm and Ashburn Village, unpainted fascia and pine porch columns in Broadlands and Farmwell Hunt, and the stained pine top rails on the newer decks in Brambleton, Moorefield Station and Loudoun Valley Estates where the decking is composite but the framing and rails underneath are still softwood. South and west-facing wood takes the worst of it. If you are seeing coarse sawdust on the deck boards, a yellowish stain streaking down from a hole, or a large bee hovering in your face at the top of the stairs, that is the male — he cannot sting. The female drilling the tunnel can, but rarely does.

The decision that matters is treat-then-seal versus seal-only. Homeowners who caulk or dowel a live gallery in June usually end up with a bigger problem, because the bees chew a fresh exit sideways through the grain and the tunnel network widens. Our sequence is the opposite: dust the galleries first so the returning adults carry the product through the tunnel, leave the holes open for a short window, then plug with wood filler or a glued dowel and touch up the finish. On a deck with heavy pressure, plugging in early fall — after the second flight of adults emerges in August — holds far better than plugging in spring.

The second trade-off is treatment versus paint. Carpenter bees avoid a hard, well-painted surface; they will accept bare, weathered, or semi-transparent-stained wood all day. Treatment protects the current season and stops the tunnels from expanding. Painting or replacing the affected rail is the permanent answer, and it costs more than we do. We will tell you plainly which boards are worth sealing and which are chewed through enough that a carpenter should look at them — and if you are in an HOA-governed section of One Loudoun, Goose Creek Village or Belmont Ridge where rail color is specified, the plugs get finished to match rather than left as raw filler.

There is also a woodpecker problem attached to this one. Downy and pileated woodpeckers in Loudoun County learn to hear the larvae and open up the gallery to eat them, which turns a clean 1/2-inch hole into a torn 4-inch gash in fascia or cedar siding. Homes backing onto tree lines — the wooded edges along the W&OD Trail corridor, the older growth near Claude Moore Park, the Goose Creek side of Belmont Country Club — see this most. Treating the larvae early in the season removes the food source before the birds find it, and that is usually the difference between a $300 pest visit and a siding repair. Call (571) 934-1689 and we will walk the deck and the roofline with you before quoting anything.