Wood-Boring Beetles in Homes

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In this Guideline:


Identification and life cycles
Management
About Pest Notes
Publication
Glossary
Three groups of wood-boring beetles—powderpost, deathwatch, and false powderpost (Table 1)—invade and damage wood furniture as well as structural and decorative wood inside of buildings. The beetle larvae feed in and do most of the damage to wood, and when they reach the adult stage, they emerge through round exit holes, which they create by chewing through the wood surface. Adults of some species also bore exit holes through plaster, plastic, and even soft metals that might cover the underlying wood.

You might see other wood-boring beetles such as flatheaded or roundheaded borers and bark or ambrosia beetles in your home if you store infested firewood inside. However, these typically are forest insects that won’t attack wood structures or furniture. They begin their life cycles on declining trees that are old or that have sustained fire or insect damage. Sometimes these forest insects are present in trees when they are milled into wood products, and they might cause alarm when they emerge from infested wood used in newly constructed buildings. However, they aren’t able to reinfest the wood in these structures.

Certain species of wood wasps also might emerge from infested wood used in new structures. See Pest Notes: Wood Wasps and Horntails for more information. Invasive wood-boring insects often arrive as hitchhikers from other continents on solid wood packing material such as pallets or in a ship’s dunnage, and some of the key beetle pests of wood in structures have likely established worldwide distributions this way.

Statewide IPM Program, Agriculture and Natural Resources, University of California
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