Even though they might want to hold your hand, it is safe to say that you would not want to hold theirs. Not to be confused with The Beatles, the English rock band that took the world by storm in the 1960s, furniture beetles are wood-boring beetles that like to…wait for it… bore through wood.
Furniture Beetle Description
Adult furniture beetles are about 1/4 inch long with oval-shaped bodies that are reddish-brown or darker in color. They are proud members of the powderpost beetle group of insects that have the uncanny ability to reduce wood to a flour-like powder. Unfortunately, this skill is hardly enough to gain the attention of teenagers world wide. Or even one teenager, for that matter.
Since they don’t have any screaming, bouffant-haired, pointy bra-wearing adoring fans that they can sing to, is there anything furniture beetles are good for? Well, not much. In fact, they have only one redeeming quality. One. That’s it, but it is kind of a biggie if you live in a forest.
What could it possibly be, you ask? I know you must be on the edge of your bug-blog-reading seat. Furniture beetles play a pretty important role in the ecology of a forest. Because they feast on dead or dying trees, they are actually the primary source of decomposition. So, I guess if you are only going to have one good thing going for you, you better make it a big one.
In non-forest areas where that one redeeming quality is drowned out by all of the non-redeeming qualities, furniture beetles can be quite destructive, and it all starts with the egg. Laying between 50 and 100 eggs once or twice per year, depending on the environment, mama furniture beetles find the perfect crevice in a piece of wood to lay her eggs. Once the eggs hatch, this is where things get ugly. And I am not just talking about how the larvae look.
Furniture Beetle Lifecycle
The larval stage is where all the wood damage gets done. Once emerging from their eggs, the super-hungry, wood-loving larvae bore deep into the wood. When that wood happens to be the wood framing of your couch, or the wood structuring of your house, or your flooring, or the siding on your house, well, let’s just say that nothing good can come of that.
Larvae will continue chewing and eating their way through the wood until they become adults, which could happen three to four years later. Three to four YEARS. Imagine all the damage that can be done in three to four years. Once they reach adulthood, they emerge from exit holes that they make by chewing their way through the wood’s surface. Adult furniture beetles do not eat the wood, they simply chew through it to find their escape.
Furniture beetles have a number of ways to enter your home, the most common ways are either flying in through an open door or window or being brought in the home inside already infested furniture. Once they make it inside, it is super simple for them to move into other pieces of furniture and other areas of the home.
How To Get Rid of Furniture Beetles
Contrary to the advice of The Beatles, this is no time to just Let It Be. This is the time to Come Together with HowToPest.com for all of your wood-boring, furniture beetle needs. John Lennon sang about getting by with a little help from his friends, and your friends at HowToPest.com are here to help you!
