It was disconcerting but I had to stop a carpenter bee from tunneling its nest on our porch pillars today. Apparently carpenter bees lay their eggs and start building their nest at this time of the year. I was out painting the porch when I noticed this strange looking bumble bee–it wasn’t as yellow and hairy as a bumble bee–but still squat and fat and it kept buzzing round and round my head. I was trying to paint the pillars and tried to wave them off but they kept coming back. One of them–there were two–went to a part of the pillar that was not painted and started drilling a hole in it. It worked like a machine drill; as I watched, I saw a nice little hole, about half an inch in diameter maybe a half an inch deep cut into the pillar. I was horrified. I called Krish and we debated what to do with this pesky little friend. We didn’t want to kill it. So naturally we googled immediately and found all kinds of wonderful information about carpenter bees, their nesting habits, how to prevent them etc. The best remedy was to keep doing what I was doing–paint paint paint the wood. They like unpainted wood. I must have applied at least three coats of primer on those posts! Carpenter bees don’t eat the wood–they just lay eggs inside them. They feed on the nectar of flowers. Can’t blame them really–our front yard is full of flowers–the rhododendrons are sagging under huge purple blossoms, the geraniums are open and inviting, so are the cerastiums, the roses are gorgeous, and the peonies will bloom pretty soon. They must be sated and happy and looking for a nest. I felt awful shooing them away but I had these visions of the two posts snapped like twigs in the middle and millions of larvae crawling across the porch floor. Brought back memories of when a cat died in our attic at my parent’s house in India and no one would go up there to clean it up. Everyone was waiting for our handyman who usually did this kind of dirty work. I was 14 or 15 then and I couldn’t stand it; the stench of the dead cat was overpowering and everyone was reluctant to go see what it was like. The poor cat had somehow gotten itself squished between two rafter beams and had died sandwiched between the beams. Finally I told my parents that I was going up whether they approved or not. The only problem was that the real entrance to the attic was through the kitchen and it was too high for me. So I decided to attack it where it was. I followed my nose and located where the stench was the worst. Then I got a ladder and pulled out one of the ceiling planks which gave me just enough room to thrust my hands inside the attic sight unseen. What was I thinking! I stood on a ladder and reached inside into the darkness of the attic.  I was lucky; the dead cat was right close to where I had opened the ceiling boards to reach into the attic. What I proceeded to do was even more horrifying and I still feel freaked out when I think about it. I had to dislodge the cat from between the beams. I couldn’t see the cat; I could only touch it. I put my hand out and touched the cat. It was cold and slimy. And as I pulled it, part of its body just opened out because it had already started to rot. Suddenly I felt maggots crawling on my hand and they were tumbling out from the attic through my hand and onto the walls and dropping on the floor. But strangely enough, then I didn’t panic or throw up. I shook my hand and and calmly asked my mother for two towels. I bandaged both of my arms up to my shoulder and proceeded to dislodge the cat once again–this time with a stick. Little by little the cat came unstuck and dropped to the floor. All the while I could hear the thick plopping sound of the maggots falling on the floor as well. Anyway the cat was down and  I swept the maggots and the cat parts into a pile, put them into a garbage sack, poured disinfectant on the floor of the attic as far as I could throw it, and crawled back down the ladder. They were all waiting there for me, looking up. Mother, father, brother. They were horrified at the maggots crawling on my bandaged hands and hair. I walked out carefully like a robot without moving a muscle, went to the garden hose and hosed myself down, maggots and all. It really helped to think at the time that in Australia people actually ate these things! The good news was that the attic was clean!

Most of the websites that we looked at recommended using pesticides and insecticides to kill carpenter bees. We didn’t want to. We filled the hole that she had bored with wood filler and sanded it down. Apparently it is the females that do the boring and tunneling. That old adage about the females of the species being more protective of their offspring than the males is apparently true for carpenter bees. The males buzz around loudly; they don’t have a sting. The females, on the other hand, if you mess with them while they are tunneling they will sting you. They hung around for some more time watching me paint, buzzing buzzing. And then the paint dried and they left. I wonder where they went.