I had six jars of essential oil bee repellent on the counter by the time I gave up. Lavender, lemongrass, peppermint, tea tree, citronella, and one that was just labeled "bee blend" from a brand I had never heard of before that summer. Six bottles, six different recipes I had cut with water and dish soap in a spray bottle, six failures in a row, and one neighbor — my cousin Maya, who lives three blocks away in Astoria and has been through this twice already — telling me on the phone, in the patient voice she reserves for things she has already told me, that I should have asked her in May. I am telling you now what she told me, because I do not want you to be on jar number six in late August the way I was.
Here is what was happening on my balcony. I had a small bistro table, a planter with basil and mint, a hummingbird feeder my landlord had explicitly told me I was allowed to keep if I cleaned it weekly, and, by mid-July, a steady stream of honeybees that would come for the sugar water, hang around the feeder for ten or fifteen minutes, and then leave the floor when they had their fill. They were not aggressive. They were not nesting in the railing. They were not, as far as I could tell, building a hive in the eaves. They were bees being bees, and they were in a place I also wanted to be. The problem was not the bees. The problem was that I did not want them there every time I sat down, and I had decided, for reasons I cannot fully reconstruct now, that the answer was an essential oil bee repellent.
I want to be clear about what an essential oil bee repellent can do, because the word "repellent" gets used loosely on the bottles and even more loosely on the blogs. What it can do, in the best case, is make a small outdoor area — a balcony, a patio, a windowsill — less interesting to a foraging honeybee for the thirty minutes after you spray it. That is a narrow window of time, and it depends on the right oils, the right dilution, the right wind, the right temperature, and the bee being a foraging honeybee rather than a defensive wasp, a carpenter bee, or a yellow jacket looking to nest. What an essential oil bee repellent cannot do, and what I learned the hard way after six jars, is solve a problem that is not really a bee problem. If you have a hive in the wall, you need an exterminator. If you have a yellow jacket nest under the deck, you need pest control. If you have carpenter bees drilling into a friend in your doorframe, the wood filler is the answer, not the oil. The oils are a tool for one specific job, and the marketing around them has not done renters any favors by suggesting otherwise.
The conversation that would have saved me five jars
I called Maya in the second week of July, after bottles two and three had failed to do much. She asked me three questions in order. First: are they honeybees or wasps? Second: are they trying to get to the hummingbird feeder, or are they circling the railing and the wood trim? Third: how close are they getting to me when I sit down? I answered honeybees, the feeder, and about a foot and a half, which is when I started waving them off with a magazine. She was quiet for a second. Then she said, "Okay, this is a one-spray problem, not a six-jar problem. Put the lavender away."
What she meant, and what I want to pass on directly, is that honeybees going after a sugar source are not being repelled by most of the things in the bottles I had been buying. They are being repelled by the smell of an open sugar source competing with the smell of a stronger sugar source. A 2:1 sugar-water hummingbird formula is the same attractant for a honeybee as it is for a hummingbird, because both animals are after the same thing. The way to make bees go away from the feeder is to make the feeder less interesting, and the way to make the feeder less interesting is to clean it more often, lower the sugar concentration, and move it six feet farther from where you actually sit. None of those things require an essential oil bee repellent at all. None of those things cost sixty dollars.
What actually worked, and what was a waste of my money
Here is the honest accounting. Jar one, lavender, was the worst purchase I made all summer. Lavender oil is calming to humans and mildly repellent to mosquitoes in some studies, but honeybees are not mosquitoes. They were not repelled by lavender in any concentration I could mix at home, and the few times the lavender spray seemed to work, it was because I had cleaned the feeder that morning, not because of the lavender. Jar two, lemongrass, did better. Lemongrass oil has some published repellent effect against some bees in some studies, but the effect is on the order of "slightly less likely to land," not "leave the area." Jar three, peppermint, did almost nothing for bees but did successfully keep a family of spiders out of the corner of the balcony for about three weeks, which was an unexpected bonus. Jar four, tea tree, was wasted on this problem entirely. Jar five, citronella, is a mosquito product and was wasted on this problem entirely. Jar six, the proprietary bee blend, was the most expensive and did nothing the others did not do, and it smelled the worst.
What actually changed the situation on the balcony was a Saturday morning in early August when I cleaned the hummingbird feeder twice, replaced the sugar water with a 1:4 ratio instead of the 1:3 I had been using, moved the feeder six feet away from my chair, and put a small open dish of plain water on the table between us. The bees went after the feeder, which was now farther and weaker. They were not repelled. They were simply less interested. Within three days the daily traffic was down to about a third of what it had been, and within a week it was down to almost nothing. I had not repelled them. I had out-competed myself.
If you still want a spray, the only recipes that have any peer-reviewed evidence
There is a small literature on this, and I read most of it the week of August 12 after I had already spent the money, so let me pass on what is actually in it. The two oils that show up most often in field studies are lemongrass and, less consistently, citronella. They are most useful not as a single oil but as a 1:1 blend, diluted to about 1 percent essential oil to 99 percent water, with about half a teaspoon of dish soap per quart to help the oil disperse. This is the recipe you see in a hundred blog posts, and the reason you see it everywhere is that it is the only one with consistent field data behind it. The effect is small—some studies report fewer foragers landing in the sprayed area for the hour after you spray—which on a busy balcony is enough to make sitting outside tolerable, but not enough to make it peaceful.
The timing matters as much as the recipe. Bees are most active in the morning and the late afternoon, and they are least active in the heat of midday and after sunset. If you spray in the morning before they arrive, you get a longer window. If you spray in the heat of the day, the wind is washing the oil away before they get there. If you spray after dark, you are spraying for your own benefit, because no foraging bee is going to be in the area until the next morning. The other piece of timing is that bees may adjust to smells over the course of a few days, which is why the same recipe that worked on Monday can feel half as effective by Friday. Switching the active oil every week—between lemongrass and a peppermint-eucalyptus blend, for example—is one workaround, though not a guaranteed one.
What the oil cannot do for you, and when to stop
If the bees you are seeing are not honeybees—if they are smaller, darker, hairless, and faster; if they are coming and going from a single hole in the railing or the eaves; if they are showing up in numbers larger than five at a time—you are not looking at a repellent problem. You are looking at a wasp, carpenter bee, or yellow jacket problem, and the right answer is not in any of the six jars I bought. Essential oils are not an effective wasp repellent at concentrations a renter can safely mix at home. Carpenter bees do not respond to them at all. Yellow jackets respond to a different set of smells entirely, and none of those are in the bottle labeled "bee blend." If you see what looks like a hive — a papery nest under the deck, a waxy comb in the eaves, a stream of bees going in and out of a hole in the wall — call your landlord and call pest control the same day. This is not a six-jar problem. This is a lease-clause problem, and your renter's insurance, if you have it, may actually cover part of the treatment if the hive was pre-existing.
The last thing I want to say is the thing I wish someone had said to me in May: bees on a balcony in summer are doing exactly what bees do, and most of what I was calling a problem was just part of living in the same city as them. The oil did not teach me that. Maya did, after I had spent the money. If you are about to buy jar one, call someone who has been through this first, or do the feeder math before you do. You may save the sixty dollars, and you will probably end up with a cleaner hummingbird feeder, which is its own reward.
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