How to remove earwigs from your garden and bee house

Earwigs love dark spaces and behind your nesting block is the perfect space that earwigs may turn into their home too. Our nesting blocks also come with a dark cardboard backing to provide your mason bees a dark nesting chamber.

If you start to see earwigs appear around your black house, here are some ways to remove them and prevent them from coming back:

1) Create an Insect Barrier – This also works well for ants. You can wrap the bottom of your bee house with blue painters tape then smear it with a sticky substance like Tanglefoot (https://www.tanglefoot.com/) or BioGlue. Both are non-toxic and will stop or prevent ants from entering your bee house. This will also work for your fruit trees or other ant paths in your yard. You can find these in most garden nurseries

2) Set a Sticky Trap Behind Your Nesting Block – In the space behind your nesting block you can place MINI GLUE STRIPS that the earwigs will crawl onto and then get trapped. Link to non-toxic mini glue traps –  https://a.co/d/9piIsF5

3) Put Block in the Sun – Earwigs are nocturnal and hate the sun. If you’re having a nice sunny day, with no rain, take your nesting block out and set it on top of your black house for about an hour. The earwigs will scurry away and seek darkness.

Earwigs can do serious damage to your seedlings, cornstalks and fruit. You can identify earwig damage in your garden when you see evidence of leaves or petals of plants being chewed. They could also harm your baby mason bees. They like to crawl into the holes and eat the pollen and even your baby larvae. Once the larvae have formed their cocoons, the earwigs don’t normally bother them, but when they are a larvae, they need protection from predators.

Earwigs can also be good for your garden because they eat insect eggs, aphids, and other soft-bodied pests. If you have too many earwigs in your garden or you see them near your mason bee house, here are two organic earwig traps you can use to cut down on their populations a bit to protect your garden and mason bees.

DAMP ROLLED UP NEWSPAPER

OIL TRAP (Tie the traps to your house or base of post)

OIL TRAP FOR YOUR RAISED GARDEN BEDS (This is a great tip from Epic Gardening – Kevin Espiritu)