You have not put service at the table, but it turns out that it is being taken as an aperitif. Discover how to identify and eliminate this annoying insect (woodworm) that lives on your furniture.
How to identify the woodworm?
Make sure if a piece has woodworm by inserting a needle into the holes. If it sinks, it is not woodworm, since it digs its galleries parallel to the surface and the hole forms a very shallow elbow. Traces of sawdust are also informers: woodworm, when drilling, is not clean at all and always leaves its mark.
Recover With Caution
You have inherited an old piece of furniture or found in a market a piece that you can not miss and want to make a hole in your house. No problem, you just have to follow a series of steps to check that you do not have woodworm, that annoying plague that affects the wood.
Step By Step
First of all, before starting with the anticarcinoma treatment, the first step is to remove the powder well to leave the surfaces and nooks well clean and that the process is most effective.
Attack
To combat woodworm, one of the most effective treatments is to inject a special solution (which you can find in hardware stores). In many cases, they include the syringe to introduce the liquid through the holes. Otherwise, you should get one at the pharmacy, for example.
And Plasticize!
After injecting the liquid through all the holes, wrap the furniture in plastic (it can be film type) for several days and repeat the operation, leaving it once again wrapped and tightly covered for three weeks.
Treat Woodworm In Complicated Pieces
In more bulky pieces such as cabinets it is convenient to disassemble and treat each part separately: on one side the skeleton or structure, on the other the drawers and on the other the doors.
Complicated Pieces
If the wooden furniture is small with spraying or applying an insecticide gel, it will be enough. But in large pieces, it is preferable to inject the solution against the woodworm.
After Trying, Perfect
After the treatment, we recommend doing a thorough cleaning, with a cloth and a soft brush for the nooks and crannies. And if you can make it with natural products even better.
Choose The Finish
There are those who prefer to leave the natural finish of the wood, but if you prefer, you can also pass some wax or a nice varnish.
Aesthetic Holes
The vintage aspect of the furniture is so much worn that in many artisanal pieces, wood is used with holes caused by woodworm so that they have more value.
Eye To Structural Damage
A plague of woodworm in the beams of a house is very dangerous. So you have to drill one by one (making holes up and down in a zigzag way) to inject the insecticide product then.
Before inviting an old piece of furniture to live in your house or to keep an old one without restoring distrust. Why? Because it can bring with it an undesirable plague of woodworm that could spread without remedy. Yes, that table inherited from the people takes with your family all your life and pretend that it remains that way.
Or maybe you’ve found in a flea market a chest of drawers of the XIX that you can not miss. But the first thing you have to do with the piece in question is to treat it with suspicion: approach, observe it, sink a needle into the holes and, just in case, apply an insecticide product to stay calmer.
Meet The Enemy: What Is Woodworm?
The woodworm is an insect of the family of beetles that feed on wood. Usually, they feed on dead wood already worked (furniture, beams, art …) or not (dead trunks), and also prefer softwoods, such as pine and cedar.
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During the spring or autumn, it dedicates itself to find new sources of food in which it fixes to chew the sapwood, the young part of the wood, and to mate. Later, the larvae will continue digging galleries until they become adults and leave the wood through holes towards the outside.
Telltale holes, since they will be the definitive proof that the piece is infected; also the traces of small piles of sawdust next to the furniture. And if you have a large ear, approach it to the wood: the experts are able to recognize the sound of the larvae when chewing and digesting – they assure that it resembles that of the rain (yes, you read correctly).
Once detected, the solution is to apply insecticide and fungicide products that end with the pest. In addition to the injection of the anti-woodworm solution, there are other methods.
Means To Fight It
- Spraying: the treatment is applied on the surface of small pieces of woodwork.
- Injection: the insecticide product is injected under pressure into the wood. It is the most suitable way for large structural surfaces, such as beams or wall cladding
- Gel: as with spraying, it is intended to avoid drilling the wood for aesthetic reasons. It is usual to use these insecticide gels on works of art to prevent woodworm.
- Bubble: specialized treatment that uses a bubble as a barrier to modify the atmosphere and eliminate insects without the need for chemicals. And it’s mobile.
