Wood boring bugs in my new cedar

[tapsnap]

I'm getting some wood boring bugs emerging in some of the green white cedar I recently bought. I noticed it today and immediately started sawing off all the sapwood. Unfortunately, some of the bugs have gone into the heartwood. I know some of you warned me about this but I had no idea it would happen so quickly. It was cut at the mill only about 2 weeks ago. I've been in England over the past week and didn't have time to cut off the sapwood before I left. Is there something I can use to kill them off before they do more damage? Will bleach work?

[Jim Ledger]

Tim-Bor might help. It's a borate based fungicide and insecticide, water soluble.

[GBVT]

Fire will fix the little buggers.

[tapsnap]

Perhaps I'll make a larger steam box and steam everything for an hour.

[SMARTINSEN]

Any of the common off the shelf insecticides with pyrethines should work. In a water solution it would probably not affect the color of the wood.

[tapsnap]

I've identified them as ambrosia beetles.

[mobjack68]

find the closest greenhouse operation and ask the operators if you can insert your lumber in with their next fumigation.

[Bill Huson]

Borax ??? Yeah, 20 mule team Borax. As an addeed perc, your wood will be clean!

[rob]

Assuming you don't have too much material, and the infestation isn't too severe the solution is pretty easy. Cut off the sap, this will expose any tunnels leading into the heart. Take a small syringre with with a long flexible tip (like a WEST epoxy syringe) and put a shot of insecticiede or a strong solvent like acetone or pure turps into each hole. They won't be very deep in and those soft boddied grubs are pretty easy to kill...they rely on the wood as thier protection. Personaly I would use solvent or borate so I don't have to worry about toxic residue later when working material.

[Bob Smalser]

You don't need to do anything at all.

The beetle larvae only affect the sapwood where there is high moisture to protect their skin and sugar to produce food. (Heartwood has nothing for them to eat.) They will promptly depart or die as soon as the wood dries out. Pouring an insecticide or salt solution on the wood will only slow the drying process and won't reach in and get all the beetles.

The only exception are the smaller beetle larva of the Powder Post species who eat startch, but they generally prefer the heartwood of dry hardwoods and don't attack green cedar.

For more information, here is an article I posted on the subject:

Brown Rot, White Rot and other Wood Pestilence (http://www.woodenboatvb.com/vbulletin/upload/showthread.php?t=71429)

PS....none of the methods mentioned above will work reliably either. The only way to kill wood pests with 100% reliability is kilning.

Everybody who airdries any amount of green cedar will eventually experience beetles. In summer if you don't either mill or debark your logs within two weeks of falling, you will get ambrosia beetles and lose the sapwood. In walnut and other furniture woods, that costs you money. In boat wood where you aren't going to use the sapwood anyway, it's no big deal.

[rob]

Everything Bob said is 100% true. Unfortuantly for those of us on this coast there is often little more than 6" of heart in many cedar flitches, and those little buggers take 1/2-3/4" to make a U turn or die out when they hit the heart (assuming moisture hasn't dropped off by then) Losing 1-1.5"(half from each side) of width can often take stock that is just wide enough to sneak a plank onto to the point of being too narrow to use. I have the luxury of keeping a lot of cedar around so I don't worry about it too much and set the stuff aside for narrower work, but if you only have 80-100bdf for a small boat's planking losing a bunch flitches of clear stock can be pretty rough blow...it's getting pretty tough to get good stock in the first place.

[Bob Smalser]

...Losing 1-1.5"(half from each side) of width can often take stock that is just wide enough to sneak a plank onto to the point of being too narrow to use....



Regardless, you are still wasting time and money messing around with liquid or spray pesticides. None come close to reaching all the nooks and crannies necessary to kill all the grubs in those bore holes. If you don't prevent beetles from infesting the logs, you are stuck with the damage, as most occurred before your boards were even milled.

Dry the lumber, rip the sap off, and fill any remaining insect holes with thickened epoxy. If the wood is dry enough to use, the grub will be long gone.

[tapsnap]

The wood is still green, so I wanted to prevent further damage and despite the fact that the majority of the holes were in the sapwood, (which has now been burned) there are still plenty of holes in the heartwood. I ended up making a plastic tent around the stack of wood and set off 3 fumigation bombs inside it. When I unwrapped the bundle, I found a lot of dead bugs on the surface of the boards. I then covered each plank with boric acid as I restacked the pile to dry. Even if my actions are too late for these boards, at least these bugs won't have a chance to go off and attack the trees on my property.