Once the beetles leave the wood, they tend to fly towards a source of light in search of a mate, so window sills are a good place to check for beetles waiting for their first date! However, the most obvious sign of an active infestation is to find actual beetles. If you leave a piece of paper under affected wood between March and October, you might be able to spot new frass as the beetles emerge for their flight season. However, just the presence of holes doesn’t mean that woodworm is necessarily active.įresh ‘frass’, a very fine wood dust produced by the beetles as they burrow through the timber, is another good indicator of an active infestation. Sometimes there might only be one or two holes, but in more extreme cases there can be lots quite close together.Įxit holes from active woodworm will look ‘fresh’: clean and bright, like newly sawn wood, whereas older holes look dull and have rounded edges. These exit holes will be very small, <5mm diameter, and are not easily spotted without close inspection. It’s surprisingly simple to tell if you have had a case of woodworm infestation on visible wood: all you need to do is check your timbers for small holes in the face of the wood. However, active woodworm should be treated to prevent further damage. Unless serious structural damage has been done at which case a structural engineer will need to be consulted, inactive woodworm is completely harmless. Knowing the tell-tale signs of woodworm and its causes will help you assess a home for renovation so you know what will be involved. This can be particularly problematic for old timber frame buildings. The eggs hatch into larvae, which then make their way through the tunnels left by their predecessors, often deeper into the wood, thus continuing the cycle of timber degradation. Once they have emerged, the beetles mate, and the females then return to lay their eggs in the exit holes they made earlier. Other woodborers include: Death Watch Beetle, which infests only large old hardwood beams the House Longhorn, confined – at least for the moment – to North West Surrey Powder Post Beetle which needs a diet of starch in certain hardwoods, and woodboring weevils, which are associated with wet rot and die out when it is treated.Eventually, the larvae pupate and the adult beetles emerge between late spring and autumn, leaving their telltale exit holes behind them.Īdult beetles are smaller than a grain of rice, and have a very short lifespan after they have emerged from the wood, with a four day ‘flight season’ for males, and two weeks for females. They may then attack floorboards, joinery and, more seriously, structural timbers such as rafters and joists. Woodworm is frequently introduced into the house in second-hand furniture, tea chests or wicker-work but the beetles are quite capable of flying in through a window from nearby dead branches of trees. It lays eggs on rough, unpolished wood and the grubs bore straight into the wood – leaving no trace until they emerge as beetles three years or so later, usually between May and September. The adult Furniture Beetle is a small brown insect 3mm to 6mm long which flies quite readily. The holes are made by emerging adult beetles, immature grubs may still be tunnelling away inside the wood. Fresh holes show clean white wood inside. A term used for the destructive larvae of the Common Furniture Beetle.įirst sign of woodworm is the appearance of neat round holes, 2mm across, in wooden surfaces, often accompanied by tiny piles of wood dust beneath them.
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