For the uninitiated, carpenter bees bore into wood and lay their eggs. That's fine as long as the wood in question is a dead tree. Not so fine when it's your house. Even worse when pileated woodpeckers try to rip your house apart to get at the bee larvae, which they seem to be able to hear from miles away.

Carpenter bees will first try to expand an existing burrow before starting a new one from scratch. The holes drilled in the bee traps mimic the openings of burrows. The bees crawl into them to investigate and then can't get out. They can't crawl up the sides of a glass jar and their wings are too small for them to take off vertically.