Yea, the carpenter bees are tough. U used to help my daughter with the horses and would have the feed scoop and whack them with it. They would fly 20' after I hit them and I'd have to chase them down and step on them before they recovered or they would get back up. The traps are awesome to reduce them.
When I was a kid, I used to take my crossman pellet gun out in the morning, unloaded. Pump it up ten times and put the muzzle in the bee holes and pull the trigger. Repeat on as many holes as I could reach and I halved the population in a day.