Bees on Our Playscape

Hello M.,

see where they go to and call a professional to remove the bees. right now so many bees are disappearing so please DO NOT KILL THEM. good luck! ~Carmen~

M.,

Call Dee at AAA Bees One. All he does is bees and he's amazing. Knows everything and gets rid of them every time. Plus he has a longer warranty than anyone else out there.

I've been using him for many years. My house sits on a giant piece of land with no trees other than those that ring my property. Because of the intense heat, I am a magnet for all kinds of bees, wasps, and hornets. Once Dee takes care of them, I rarely have to call him back. He does stop by and check things on his own during the season though.

His number is ###-###-####

Good Luck
L.

well bees are not normally drawn to playsets, however if being put up if someone has spilled juice on it, that could, or they could think its a pretty flower, ahahah i would wash it, with soap and water , spray it down, and if bees continue to be there, i would buy a bee spray, and spray the area , i would also look in the nooks and crannys and under things for a nest, and remove it, just spray the area around it too, hope things work out D. s

M.
i spray with a garlic spray i do my whole yard and it keeps the bees wasp and any other bug out of my yard and that hard to do when you live on a lake

If they're yellow jackets they make traps. Its very simple and inexpensive. We use them near our flower gardens and it has cut down on them enormously. Good luck!

You know we have the same problem. We put an owl on it to keep the birds off found out the owl had nests of bees in it. So this year our owl busted from a storm and my husband put the windmill twirly things up. They are working to keep the birds off. But for the bees we noticed that the large mother bees have made a tunnel through one piece of wood on it. There is no nest but a tunnel they fly through. I don't know what else to say other than maybe spraying it down with wasp and bee killer. If you spray the bee directly it dies automatically. We have a bee problem with our pool. we use water and dawn soap if you soak the bee it dies with the dawn thats another remedy more safe for the kids. The only problem is it will leave your swing set slippery. If you find something better please let me know.

When we bought our playscape, the salesman said cedar does not attract bees more than any other wood. He said what attracts them is UNFINISHED wood because it is soft and they eat it. He said the way to keep them away is by keeping the playscape stained (or painted - though that would look weird). If the stain wears off anywhere, you need to restain it. This makes the wood too hard for the bees to chew. I believe this is true because our old worn playset at our last had was swarmed with bees while our brandnew fully stained playset has no bees at all.

Also, like someone else said, if the bees are HUGE, mainly black, and make perfectly round holes/tunnels, they are carpenter bees. We had them on our deck at another house. They are very aggressive (defending their holes), but I also have been told they do not sting. We were told to fill in any holes they have created with silicone to keep them from coming back. It helped a little.

Hi,

We had a problem with paper wasps. They look like bees and eat wood as well as water to make their nests. They are also very agressive and can sting multiple times without losing their stingers. I was stung 6 times by the same wasp several years ago. I would suggest that you check out the structure in the evening looking for nests. Don't do it during the day. Raid makes a good wasp killer. You need to find the nest though. Also is the structure treated? They will stay away from treated wood.

Bees, or probably yellow jackets, which are a type of wasp, do like cedar, sad to say, but they may have a nest elsewhere, like in the ground or an old stump--I recently had to deal with them nesting in an old piece of wood in my front yard.
Watch them to see where they go to hide and if you can figure it out, wait until the evening, when they are less active and spray the area with wasp spray. Hope this helps. Maybe others have better ideas.

My guess is they are carpenter bees, which do not sting. We have them all over our rainbow set also. Have you noticed if they are drilling holes in the wood? That's what happened to ours, they drill perfectly circular holes and then live in the wood. The only thing we have found to get rid of them is my husband swatting them with a baseball bat! They are very annoying but if they are carpenter bees they don't sting so they are harmless...aside from all the holes in the wood.

We have a cedar deck with a covered roof, we can sit and watch the bees crawl into the holes that they have made in the cedar. The make holes and go inside. We watch to see where they fly in and my husband sprays the hole with some kind of insect spray. It seems to have helped.

I would go out one day without kids, and just watch the bees. There is a good chance they have taken up residence somewhere inside the playscape, but you have to watch (patiently sometimes) to see. bees and wasps will make homes in the tiniest places. If this ends up being the case, have your husband spray with bee/wasp killer into the hole/opening in the evening when they are all inside their nest.

Try tucking some dryer sheets (fabric softner) in some of the crevices. That really helped us with ours.