Not Spray, Not Essential Oils: The Humane Way To Deter Bees From Your Patio

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Between the good eats, sunny skies, and excellent company, everyone loves a backyard barbecue — including a few tiny party crashers. Bees might have a hard working reputation for busily transforming nectar into honey, but given the opportunity to score some sweets without all that labor, they'll dive right into that lemonade or brown sugar-laced barbecue sauce. "Once a scout bee finds a sugary food source, they may fly back to the hive and tell the others where to find it," David Burrows, founder of Arkearth, a nonprofit focused on saving bees and other pollinators, explained in an interview for Martha Stewart. "You'll go from one to possibly dozens of honeybees at your table."

There are a few ways to get rid of bees and spare yourself that swarm, but you'll want to do so without harming the hive as bees pollinate nearly 85% of the crops we all eat. Herbs like mint, thyme, basil, and citronella repel carpenter bees and as a whole, they're not big on vinegar. But one of the most effective, humane ways to deal with bees is to quite literally smoke them out. If you're cooking, the smoke coming off your barbecue should be enough to drive them away. For all other situations, "You may also purchase a bee smoker to use around the table," Burrows noted. "It's also a great conversation piece to talk about beekeeping, bee behaviors, and the importance of pollinators." After learning some more, you might even want to bring more bees into your yard and garden — away from your hangout spot, of course.

Where there's smoke, there's unlikely to be a swarm of bees. To them, the exhaust signals danger. Believing that their hive is going to catch fire, bees begin storing as much honey as possible in their bodies to transport to a new habitat. And once they're chock full of honey, they're less likely to sting. The smoke also masks the scent of a pheromone bees release to alert others that they need to ready themselves for an attack.

To stop a potential swarm in its tracks, consider purchasing a smoker such as Vivo's Stainless Steel Bee Hive Smoker, which has earned 4.6 out of 5 stars from more than 2,800 reviewers on Amazon. To effectively calm the hive, you'll want to fill the fire chamber with tinder such as burlap, pine needles, wood pellets, twigs, or cardboard. Then, ignite the kindling from the bottom and pump the bellows gently to add some literal fuel to the fire. "I just use a couple of wadded pieces of paper, which I light, then drop in a handful or two of dry straw or pine needles," detailed one five-star Amazon reviewer. "When they're burning, I add a half-handful of fireplace wood pellets. We have fireplaces that burn them. I use the bellows with slow puffs to get these glowing, and I have more than enough smoke to go for the 30 [to] 40 minutes I need."