Swiss Cheese Made By Bees?

So yesterday I went out onto the deck to take a few pictures of the river and noticed a pile of what appeared to be sawdust on the deck. What the...? I looked to the wood overhang above and see something like this...

Carpenter Bee drilling hole.

A bee of some sort was drilling its way into the wood. I have the heebie-jeebies just thinking about it. All I could imagine was an army of these asshole bees turning the wooden deck into swiss cheese and my family and friends plummeting to our deaths when the structural integrity of the deck gives way. So I ran to the interwebs to find out what to do. 

The first thing I found was a nice photo showcasing the damage these things do. Their name? Carpenter Bees. I had heard of them before but for some reason I thought they were the bees who nested in the ground. I was wrong, of course, those bees are just a type of bumble bee. 

Carpenter Bee tunnel.

The tunnels go deep and the bees return every year making new tunnels until the wood is destroyed. Here is how it works. The female bee is the worker bee, the one who does all of the drilling, while the male circles around protecting her while she works. Looks like they got it backward though, because the male can't sting and the female is so busy working that she doesn't really pose a threat. After the female drills her tunnel, she deposits her eggs and then seals the tunnel entrance back up. A few weeks later she dies. Once the new bees hatch, they eat their way out of the tunnel and the process starts again. 

Male and female carpenter bees.

To soothe my conscious about killing them, the interwebs assures me that they are poor pollinators and are even considered pollen thieves because they don't do anything useful with the pollen. As comforting as this may be and as much as these creeps make my skin crawl, I'm still not convinced they deserve to die for doing what nature intended them to. 

Carpenter Bee hole and sawdust.

So how do I make them leave? The interwebs insists I spray the tunnels with toxic pesticides, and believe me, it's tempting, but there has to be a better way, right? I spent quite a bit of time researching and many people had good ideas for a natural repellent but no one had done anything that had actually worked. Well, shit. You guys have any ideas? 

~ Love & Light ~