Carpenter bees are most active in spring through early summer, drilling into eaves and fascia around Old Town and Berry Creek homes
Carpenter bees are large, mostly black bees that bore round, pencil-width holes into bare or weathered wood on eaves, fascia, decks and fences. They tunnel with the grain rather than eating the wood, and in Georgetown they are most active from spring through the warm months.
Fall field crickets swarming porch lights along Austin Avenue and the Square
A perfect round hole in a soffit, deck rail or eave means a female has bored a tunnel to lay eggs and that spot is now an established entry point into the wood. It will likely get reopened and extended next spring rather than abandoned, so it's worth marking now even if you don't act on it right away.
Coarse sawdust piled under a hole means the tunnel is active or was very recently. It tells you exactly which hole to treat first rather than guessing across an entire eave, and it's a better indicator of current activity than the hole alone.
Low buzzing from inside a board on a warm day means there's a bee working the tunnel right now, usually a female extending it or provisioning it with pollen for eggs. Hearing it from more than one spot along the same fascia board means you're dealing with more than one tunnel, which changes how the treatment needs to be scoped.
Woodpecker damage, torn or pecked-open wood around an existing hole, means a bird has found larvae inside the tunnel and is digging them out. It's a sign the infestation has been established long enough to produce a new generation, and the resulting damage is often worse than the original tunnel.
Fresh sawdust-like frass pushed out of a hole, sometimes with a yellow-brown streak below it, means an entry point is active right now and the female is still excavating a tunnel behind it. Treat the hole directly rather than just the streak, since painting over it without treatment leaves the gallery intact behind the wood.
Carpenter bees in Georgetown go after unpainted or weathered softwood: eaves, fascia boards, deck rails, fence caps, and the trim on older houses around Old Town and Serenada. A single bee bores a perfectly round entry point, then turns and tunnels with the grain, so the sign is a hole with a gallery, not a hole with a chewed edge.
Wolf Ranch and Teravista have newer trim that is still painted and sealed, which the bees mostly leave alone, while bare wood on sheds, pergolas and porch overhangs near Berry Creek and Water Oak draws them back to the same board year after year if last season's holes were never filled.
Roof rats outnumber Norway rats in Georgetown, and they get in high rather than low. A limb touching the fascia near Berry Creek or a gap at a soffit line in Teravista does more damage than any crack at ground level, because these rats bridge in from power lines and tree cover and settle into attics and gable vents. Norway rats show up too, but mostly near drainage low down. Checking the roofline first saves a homeowner from chasing the wrong entry point for weeks.
Bumblebees. A bumblebee's abdomen is covered in hair, often with yellow or orange banding, and it nests in the ground or in dense grass, not in your fascia board. A carpenter bee's abdomen is bare and black and shiny. If the bee is hovering near a drilled hole in wood rather than around a flower bed, it's a carpenter bee, not a bumblebee.
The licensed pros we connect you with treat each active entry point directly, usually with a dust or residual product worked into the gallery so a returning bee or a hatching one contacts it, then seal the hole once activity has stopped rather than sealing over live insects.
Because a female tends to reuse or extend a tunnel from a prior season, an inspection usually checks fascia, eaves and any exposed deck or fence wood for old, weathered holes as well as fresh ones, since an untreated old gallery is next year's infestation waiting in the same board.
Roof rats get into Georgetown houses at the top, not the bottom. They travel fence lines and oak limbs into the eaves, then work in wherever the roofline gives them an opening. That's why an inspection here checks soffits and attic vents before anything else. Water Oak and Berry Creek both back onto tree cover that makes this an easy route for them.
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A homeowner can plug an old, confirmed-empty hole with wood filler and repaint bare trim, which removes the wood bees prefer, but drilling into an active hole or spraying it without knowing whether the tunnel is still occupied just pushes the bee to bore a second entry point nearby.
Carpenter bees rarely sting; the males that hover and defend the nest area have no stinger, and the females are not aggressive unless handled directly, so the real cost here is to the wood, not to anyone standing under it.
Whether it's a roof rat that got into the attic off a tree limb near Berry Creek or crickets piling up under a porch light off Williams Drive, the fix starts with knowing which pest you actually have. The licensed pros we connect you with serve Georgetown and out toward Round Rock and Liberty Hill, and they'll ask the right questions before anyone sets foot on the property. Reach out today and get a straight answer instead of a guess.Scorpion visits usually come with an entry point already at fault — a slab crack, a loose weep screen, a gap around a laundry line. Fixing that spot is often folded into the same visit rather than billed as extra, since it's a few minutes of caulk and screen versus a repeat call in July. Roof rat exclusion works the same way: the estimate covers sealing the fascia gap or gable vent that let them into the attic in the first place, not just clearing what's already up there. pricing guide, and the service that handles this is General Pest Control.
Pest Identification. Striped bark scorpions are common in Georgetown from April through October, peaking June through August.
Ant Identification. Odorous house ants are small, dark brown to black ants that leave a rotten-coconut smell when crushed, common in Georgetown homes when summer drought pulls the clay away from the slab edge.
Pest Identification. German cockroaches are the small tan roach with two dark racing stripes on the back that lives inside Georgetown homes year-round, concentrated in kitchens and bathrooms.
A carpenter bee is often mistaken for a bumblebee, but the difference is easy to check: carpenter bees have a shiny, bare black abdomen, while bumblebees are fuzzy all over. In Georgetown they show up on eaves, deck rails and fascia boards, especially older cedar and pine trim around Old Town and Serenada. The sign to look for is a perfectly round hole about the size of a pencil, with coarse sawdust underneath it.
Carpenter bees are most active in Georgetown through spring into early summer, when females are boring new tunnels or reopening old ones to lay eggs. Activity slows in the hotter, drier stretch of summer and picks up again as new adults emerge later in the season. Because the same tunnel gets reused and extended year after year, a board on a home near Old Town or out toward Berry Creek that had bees last spring is likely to have them again unless the wood is treated or the tunnel is filled and sealed.
One or two holes on a detached deck rail usually isn't a structural concern, but repeated tunneling in the same fascia board or eave over several seasons can weaken the wood enough to invite rot and give other pests an easier way in. The bigger risk in Georgetown is woodpeckers, which target the larvae inside the tunnels and can tear open siding chasing them. If you're seeing fresh holes every spring on the same structure, that's worth having the licensed pros we connect you with take a look at before the wood itself starts to fail.
One or two holes on a porch beam usually isn't an infestation, just a female excavating a single tunnel for her eggs. It becomes a bigger problem when the same gallery gets reused and extended year after year, which is common on unpainted fascia along Williams Drive and DB Wood Road homes with exposed wood trim. A quick inspection of the eaves and rafter tails will show whether the tunnels are old and dry or freshly worked.
East of I-35, near Teravista and Rivery, blackland clay swells and shrinks, opening slab gaps that let roof rats and fire ant colonies push indoors during a dry spell.
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