Common furniture beetle
The common furniture beetle is a tiny brown beetle that lives in old wood. You hardly ever see the beetle itself, but you can see the little round holes it leaves in furniture and floorboards. Its head is hidden under a shield that looks like a monk's hood.
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Fun facts
Its larvae tunnel through wood for three to four years before they become beetles.
When the beetle comes out, it leaves a round hole only 1 to 1.5 millimetres wide and a little pile of wood dust.
It only likes the softer outer wood of a tree and usually leaves the hard inner wood alone.
Wood that is very dry is safe from it, so keeping houses dry helps keep it away.
Freezing the wood, or heating it to 50 degrees for a day, kills the larvae inside.
Most asked questions about Common furniture beetle
?How do I know if I have furniture beetles?
Look for tiny round holes in wood with fine dust around them.
?How big is the common furniture beetle?
Only about 3 to 4.5 millimetres long, smaller than a grain of rice.
?Is the common furniture beetle dangerous?
Not to people. It only eats old wood.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Anobium punctatum
- Group
- Beetles
- Family
- Ptinidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Coleoptera > Ptinidae
- Lives on
- Europe, Asia, Africa, North America, South America, Australia and Oceania
- Also known as
- Common house borer
Where the facts come from
- Common furniture beetle (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0): what it looks like, where it lives, what it eats, sizes and fun facts, retold in simple words.
- Picture by Siga. CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons. The round sticker of this bug is cut from the same picture.
If we got something wrong, sorry, we are bug fans, not a science journal. Tell us at hello@bugwiki.app and we will fix it.
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