I was recently sorting and re-arranging my stacked and stickered lumber supply when I noticed it looks like my air dried ash has some powder post beetles. There were some small piles of very find sawdust, some small holes, and, most telling, dead insects.
It's currently stored in my dry as a bone, hvac year round basement, new construction with poured concrete walls. I also have walnut, qs white oak, cherry, poplar and white pine all stored together.
Don't know where your located. Years ago I worked in a warehouse in Portland, Or. We had to stack cardboard boxes at least 3 feet from the poured concrete walls or they would draw moisture and buckle. I pretty sure your stacked lumber will do the same. You might want to seal the walls and floor if you haven't already. That might help with reduce the bugs.
I'm in PA. The house is on top of a well drained hillside. The walls are sealed on the outside, and have an insulated moisture barrier pinned on the inside. I've never had any issue with water or dampness. Even when Sandy came through, I don't think our sump pump had to run.
The ash where I've noticed them was the only hardwood lumber I've bought so far this year, so they had to have been in it before I brought it home.
I'm thinking about getting rid of the ash, and spraying down the rest of the wood with Bora-Care. Or maybe keep the ash and spray everything down.
Those beetles are bad in mesquite as well.
I tried using Timbor but it really wasn't effective. I think pretty much putting pieces in an oven or a kiln are the best ways to kill them.
The more that I think about it, the board that looked the worst had some bark on the one end. Maybe get rid of that, spray the Bora-Care on the whole stack, and continue to monitor. I don't want to throw the baby out with the bath water just yet.
I wouldn't be in too much haste. There are some powderpost style beetles that can survive and reproduce in dry wood, but most can't. They're probably just residual from when the wood was still wet. If you're worried about small boards you can sterilize them by leaving them in your car on a sunny, hot day, if it's hot enough. An afternoon at 130 degrees will kill most wood boring insects.
I don't think bora-care stains, but it's expensive and I have personal doubts about whether it will penetrate deep enough to kill them anyway. I would deal with the infested boards and just keep an eye on the rest.
I think the worrying thing was I brought the wood inside in April, it had been air drying in my lumber guys barn for 4 years. I've had projects going on so I've let the lumber storage area get a bit disorganized. I started to clean it up last week, I moved a few boards out of the way and they sat there for a few days while I had other things going on. When I came back to finish the cleanup, there were a few little piles of talc like saw dust.
No telling. He could be wrong about the dates, those boards could have at one point been in a humid spot like on dirt, a leaky roof, etc. Maybe check it with a moisture meter.
I am no expert, but I believe the larvae are tougher once they're established, and that they can't get established in dry wood, so they won't be able to reproduce and that'll be the end of them.
I've been buying from him for a couple years and have seen that pile before. Maybe since it's in a barn here in southern PA (hot humid summers, cool, occasionally cold spells in the winter) the wood stayed wet enough for them to get in some of the boards.
Powderpost beetles for sure infest dry wood. That is their MO. I would remove that wood from the storage area and the other lumber that you have there immediately and isolate it. It can take several years for the adults to emerge from infested lumber, so you can't take chances with them.
Heat, as in a kiln, will kill all beetles, larvae, and eggs. Not sure that chemical treatment is cost effective. The wood may just not be worth it.
Most "powderpost beetles" aren't powderpost beetles. And most dry wood isn't all that dry. Does that make sense? Plus true powderpost beetles only eat sapwood, right? They might move into heartwood every now and then but the adults won't deliberately lay eggs on heartwood boards.
I mean, if these things were as voracious as we imagine them to be, they'd be eating everything in sight, and they just aren't.
The real ones infest wood that is 25% moisture content or less. They love air dried wood at around 15%. The more common ambrosia beetle infests dying or dead or newly harvested logs. The have a hole about the same size as the powderpost beetle. Whereas the tunnels in the wood that the powderpost beetles make are filled with frass (finely chewed and excreted sawdust), ambrosia beetle tunnels are open with no frass. Once the wood begins to dry, the ambrosia beetles leave the boards. Just the opposite of powderpost beetles.
I let the ash sit (only ~40 bf) for 3 days and went back last night. Fresh frass piles (fine talc like powder) and even a few beetles on the underside of one of the boards. Needless to say they went outside, away from the house.
I had a big problem with powderpost beetles last year. My final solution was a lot of hard work and a used 20' shipping container that I turned into a heating kiln.
I had too much wood and a lot of it was stored dry, but outside in a barn. Since powderpost beetles are a naturally occurring pest in many areas of the country, they may find your wood if stored outside. There are two types of powderpost beetles. Lycid beetles like dry wood (6%-15%) and feed mainly on hardwoods. The anobiid (sp?) beetles prefer a wetter wood (15%-25%), but that is still within the realm of air dry in some areas. Those beetles eat both hardwood and softwood. Both prefer sapwood, but will surely eat into heartwood in certain species. Ash is almost entirely sapwood anyway, so they love that.
I had the lycid beetles. They were present on many different woods, but would infest certain boards, while leaving others untouched. I assume that the ones they ate had more sugars in them.
I got the shipping container, lined the inside on all sides with 4 inches of polyiso insulation and added 3-1500w baseboard heaters. A cheap temperature controller from Amazon controlled the heat and regulated it so that I could set it to keep a steady temperature and have a digital readout on the outside to keep track of the progress. The beetles are killed when the interior of the wood reaches 130 degrees for 30 minutes. However, this can take as little as 5 minutes or as long as 16 hours depending on the thickness of the piece and importantly the moisture content of the wood and the relative humidity of the air in the container. Since wet wood in a dry heat will be evaporating the water off its surface, the outside temperature of the board will be lower than the air temperature in the kiln. So you ideally want a 100% humidity environment in the kiln so that the board is not cooling from evaporation. I solved this by just increasing my kiln temperature to 160 degrees and spraying down the boards and kiln walls at the start of a cycle to increase the interior humidity. I also had a humidity sensor so that I could cross check with Forest service tables that show how long you need to bake a piece of wood at a certain temperature and relative humidity. And then I would still double the time to make sure that I killed them. Then I would open the kiln, go and pick out a sample board and quickly drill a small hole into the center of the board and place a temp probe in the hole to measure the interior temperature to double check.
I did this with every piece of wood that I had, including wooden shelves, fixtures, and jigs. Then I finally brought it all inside and have not found a bug yet. But I am still paranoid as they are a pain to get rid of completely. I operate a furniture business and have to make sure that everything is completely clean.
I even found a few holes in my vise faces and had to take them off and bake them too.
So don't take it lightly when you have an active infestation. It can be persistent and pervasive. I would recommend that you go through everything that you have that was in the same space as the ash and check it all and keep it segregated for at least a year to check for new holes. Treating with borax/Timbor is a good idea, but it is not a cure all and works best on new wet wood straight off the mill to prevent this from happening.
Thanks,
I did a lot of research after finding my bugs. The commercial kiln schedules for sterilizing wood were the best help as they were a scientific document made by the industry that has to kill the bugs before they can sell or ship wood.
For anyone interested, there is a great recipe for a Tim-bor style borax solution provided by the US Navy that is 60% borax and 40% boric acid by weight (IIRC). It dissolves in warm water easily and is super cheap if made with laundry borax and boric acid found as the roach powder in Lowes. Just read the roach powder to find one that is pure boric acid. I use it to treat the large slabs that I have still sitting in the barn that won't fit inside.
Matt
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