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Welcome to another episode of Peskies Pest Control podcast here in Birmingham Alabama with Michael and Travis. We do this podcast as a community service for Birmingham, Hoover, Vestavia Hills, Mountain Brook, Helena, Alabaster, Pelham and all other surrounding areas!
Michael Wienecke:
Hey, so today we want to talk about beetles, particular wood boring beetles. We had a customer that bought a TV tray, a dinner tray type of thing that went in her bedroom. She called us and said that she had some dust pouring out of the wooden part of the tray, got over there, and there was a bunch of dead beetles around it. So we found out that it was a powder post beetle, a wood boring beetle. It’s funny because we typically don’t see many live wood boring beetles around Alabama. I’ve never seen one. So that was the first for me. She bought it from a local store, came in. There’s a great picture of it. You can see the dust that was on the tray itself. It had some holes all around the tray. It was fully infested with powder post beetles, wood boring beetles. And there’s a little guy right there.
Travis McGowin:
Yeah, people don’t realize just how easy it is sometimes for something like this to go unnoticed in a piece of wood. You know, like you said, whether it’s home décor, home furnishings that they’re buying from, you know, a retail location, you know, I’ve even had a customer that had wood and wood destroying beetles inside of a crawl space from brand new wood that they had purchased from another home improvement store, you know and was wood that was supposed to have been treated and bug free basically. But yeah, you’d be surprised how many times somebody actually comes across something like this from just a general household purchase and end up getting it home. And then all of a sudden, the telltale signs, you know, show up, the indicators that you have something eating it. Like you said, the sawdust coming out, the dead beetles. And so, yeah, it’s a pretty easy and unfortunately common way to end up with an infestation in your own home.
Michael Wienecke:
Yeah, it was very easy to solve. We got rid of the wood. We treated around the affected area. And I will say, too, typically we always like we do our termite inspections or our WDOs or wood destroying organism inspections on homes that are being sold or being bought. We see it all the time where it’s old damage, but we typically never see them actually coming out of the wood. So that was that was different for us.
