As if the world hasn’t provided enough pests for college students and their residences, now nature is birthing a new crop of carpenter bees, as it does each fall. And this fall is a particularly important time for the carpenter bee, as the wood left exposed and rotting by the Wicked Witch Hurricanes of 2005 (Katrina of the East and Rita of the West) will be prime real estate for bee nesting in the coming months.We’re all familiar with carpenter bees. They’re the large, black-bellied bees that arrogantly hover in your face as they use imaginary diagonals between the sun and your house to figure out their position in space. Those are the males. They are large, obnoxious, non-stinging and good for nothing except for the one thing. Some say the same about males of more complicated organisms like humans.
It’s the females that cause wood damage by chewing perfectly cylindrical tunnels with their powerful mandibles into your favorite unpainted or rotting wood-framed structures. If you tick off a female (arthropod pun intended), she’ll sting you real good. Some say the same about females of more complicated organisms like humans.
Both the good-for-one things and the ticked-off stingers are responsible for millions of dollars of damage to wooden structures every year. I know that I sound like an agriculture extension agent when I say that, so in writing the remainder of this week’s column, I’ll pledge my head for clearer thinking and my hands for larger service.
Why is hearing about carpenter bees important for you as a student? It’s for the same reason that you’re prone to indulge in pick-up baseball games using pencils and crumpled papers or football games using wet underwear. These fun games are traditional dorm room and apartment recreations, as well as important intermissions from the rigors of studying. If you’re going to do anything to avoid studying, why not kill two bees with one pair of underwear and help protect your dorm, your classroom buildings, your home, your backyard deck and the siding around your outdoor hot tub at the same time? Make a sport out of it! Besides, when you’re broke and starving, the tamps of regurgitated nectar covering each egg in each tunnel of a carpenter bee nest are quite tasty and satisfying, as are larvae that have recently fed.
Here are three interesting games to help reduce the carpenter bee problem in your favorite neck of woods:
The Sky’s the Limit. In this game, you paint your entire dorm, hot tub or house the blue color of sky. Do your painting at night, so that the bees, which are only active during sunlight hours, don’t learn your devious strategy. When the females come around the next morning with a belly full of nectar to spit-up, or when the males come around to do the one thing, they won’t be able to use their global positioning system to find your house! Of course, neither will the UPS driver, so make sure to give him good directions when he calls. You win this game when you’ve psyched-out all your formerly resident bees, and they fly off to your neighbors house to begin chewing it to the ground. A variation of this game is to paint the bricks and vinyl siding of your house or dorm the color of rotting wood. The pests will need a lifetime of insect orthodontics after that! With your wood looking like it’s rotting, however, it’s the FEMA driver who won’t recognize your house.
Bee-ball. In this game, you’ll need a bat-preferably something firm but slender. An aluminum object is most pleasing because of the resulting “ping” of a good hit. And your stance should be less of a baseball batter’s and more of a samurai warrior’s, with the length of bat positioned vertically in front of you so that the bee’s primitive eyes will never discern it from your body. Your swing must be short and swift-all in the wrists. When an arrogant bee hovers in your face, flick your wrists to drive the bat downward, and enjoy the projectile that follows. No, you don’t have to run across the yard as if you were tagging bases because the “ping” is satisfying enough.
Bee-minton. In this game, you’ll need a badminton racket. Like the sport above, you’ll want to use your wrists and your samurai stance. Because of the elasticity of the racket strings, you can produce a slower, more graceful projectile effect than with a firm bat. But, of course, you get less of a ping. If you prefer not to surgically destroy the shuttlecock during the game, then use a tennis racket, which has thicker strings and, therefore, less of a tendency to slice. In addition, because you’re not destroying the game piece with a badminton racket, a challenging two-person game can be played over a net with a single shuttlecock. For added pleasure and one-upmanship, make sure the net is tied to something made of unpainted, rotting wood.
These are just a few of the fun recreations you can undertake with carpenter bees, while at the same time preserving the structural integrity of wooden dwellings and improving their resistance to the winds and flooding of storms. Although you want to play and you want to have fun, you may be sensitive about the crudeness of such games or about the organismal inferiority of your foe, despite its in-your-face arrogance. But remember that the original lyrics to the new top-40 hit by the White Stripes were “I’ve been chewing up your door frame, when you gonna kill me? When you gonna kill me?” before the record company forced a rewrite. It’s easy for recording executives and other outsiders to make such judgments from their disc-shaped, silvery-plastic towers. After all, silvery plastic just doesn’t taste as good as aged wood.
John Doucet is associate professor of biological sciences, director of the University Honors program and an acclaimed Louisiana playwright.
