Jan 19, 2012 – Getting To The Problem

QUESTION:

What is the best aerosol product Univar sells for wood borers that are inside antique furniture?

ANSWER:

This is a tough call, and of course I will ramble on as to why. Injecting an insecticide into wood infested with termites is more likely to control the problem, because the termites have created open tunnels that they move through on a regular basis. If you can drill a hole that enters these tunnels you can inject insecticide that the termites then will come into contact with, and hopefully even share with other termites in the colony. 

But, for beetles this is different. The beetle larva is chewing through solid wood, and getting that wood saturated with an active ingredient that the larva will contact can be difficult. For unfinished wood we can use BoraCare, as this product seems to be able to penetrate deeply into wood, carrying the borate active ingredient as it moves through. Now the solid wood is laced with a borate that will be toxic to the beetle larva that chews into that area, and the borate lasts for many years to ensure it is still there when the larva finally reaches that point. Simply drilling into the solid wood of furniture and injecting material into that wood, as the aerosol product labels state, may not put the active ingredient and the beetle larva into contact with each other. The larva fills its gallery behind itself with fecal material and does not move back and forth. The only exception to this might be Ambrosia beetles, where the female actually creates a gallery for her larvae, and these then feed on fungi that the female introduces to the gallery. 

So, I hate to be a Doubting Thomas about this, but aerosols may have a limited effect. BoraCare can be applied only to unfinished furniture, so antique furniture would likely not be a possible application for it. Even injecting aerosols could require drilling many little holes in the wood, and this could be unacceptable for fine antique furniture. The Label directions for some of the aerosol products that do list WDO beetles as a target pest can be flaky. One label lists the beetle but then gives no directions specific to that beetle. Another lists various WDO insects and then gives instructions only for termites. 

Even liquid products that could be sprayed onto infested wood are commonly labeled for WDO beetles, but spraying them onto finished antique furniture might be unacceptable. And, short of injecting these products into the wood with its limitations on effectiveness, the best you might expect from surface treating is to either kill the adult beetles as they emerge or kill the larvae that hatch from the eggs that a female has deposited in holes or crevices in that surface of the wood. Mixing a concentrate with water and applying it to wood is not going to get penetration into the wood deep enough to expect the beetle larvae to eat through it. 

If the furniture can be moved the best course of action may be fumigation, sealing it within a dedicated chamber or placing it under a tarp, and having a licensed fumigator fume it with Vikane. This is going to be fairly expensive, so the furniture needs to be worth the cost. Unfortunately the options are limited. 


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