Of Carpenter Bees and Weed Whackers

This weekend we set aside Saturday to work on the vegetable garden and get it ready. The kids had a playmate over so it freed us up to really get things done. We purchased a tiller attachment for our Ryobi expand it string trimmer/weed eater and were excited to try it out in our raised beds. We got home got it all hooked up and pulled the string to start the trimmer motor, nothing. Tried again, nothing. This went on for a while and still nothing. We then hit Google and started to forray into small engine repair. We checked the spark plug, looked good. Next we took a good hard look at the carborator (as much as you can without taking it apart) also it looked good. So wanted to start working on the garden hubby headed down to do some weeding and left me to either fix it or go get a new one. I started looking it over again. From my quick googled lessons in small engine repair I learned that there are three things needed for an engine to start, fuel, air and spark. We checked these and it definately had fuel, absolutely had spark so now air.  Was it getting air?

I started to take a closer look and I noticed that there was an odd looking thing in the exhaust hole. It looked like a filter of some sort so I poked it gently with a stick. When I did a flood of pollen came pouring out. I soon realized that it wasn’t pollen but a carpenter bee’s nest. The hole is just the right size and they must have decided that that was a good place to build one.

Once I cleared out the pollen and gunk we were able to start the motor no problem. It’s not running at 100% but it got the job done and after a 2 hour delay we were able to get half the garden ready for planting. I’ll talk more about that later in the week.

Have you ever encountered critters in your gardening equipment?

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