218 Journal of Agriculture, Victoria. f 10 April, 1918. 



own expense. Builders and architects will thus see the wisdom of care- 

 fully examining timber before it is used in the construction of buildings. 



It would be well if all timber, tool handles, bamboo blinds, wicker- 

 work, and other furniture arriving here from albroad were examined 

 on arrival and, if found to be badly infested with borers, condemned 

 and destroyed; but if only slightly affected, they might be treated with 

 some of the remedies enumerated at the end of these notes. 



Many assertions have been made that furniture beetles attack hard- 

 woods only, but, such is not the case. In fact, in the hardwood timbers 

 affected by them which I have seen, the ravages have not gone beyond 

 the sapwood; and if timber merchants see that this section be removed, 

 builders and others need have no fear in using these fine woods. In 

 the case of hickory, cedar, New Zealand kauri, blackwood, ash, deal, 

 :oak, and numerous other woods, the borers certainly do not confine 

 themselves to the sapwood only, but will riddle them through and 

 through. Often when they attack old timber in houses, they reduce 

 them to sawdust in a very short space of time. Examples of infested 

 timber taken from dwellings are illustrated, and these and other samples 

 may be seen at the Entomological Museum attaclied to the Department 

 of Agriculture. 



The efforts of the Powellised wood process against white ants have 

 been very successful, and there is no doubt that the same process would 

 be successful against timber borers. The difficulty experienced in 

 destroying the different kinds of wood-boring beetles in the various 

 stages of their existence is very great, because, as already stated, in some 

 cases the damage is done before the insects are noticed, and in others the 

 wood is infected with the larvas O'f the beetles prior to its being cut up 

 and used for building purposes, or made into furniture. 



All timber should be dried as soon as possible, and not allowed to 

 remain closely packed in timber yards for any length of time. Unfor- 

 tunately some timber merchants allow the timber fresh from the forest 

 to be packed with timber which has lain in the yard for a considerable 

 length of time. This is a bad practice, and sometimes it is from such 

 l^laces that infestation comes. A good system, which is adopted in Tas- 

 mania, is to allow the timber to remain in the open air for a period 

 of about eighteen months. This allows the hardwood to become 

 thoroughly dried. 



In Victoria there is a process of artificially seasoning timber, which 

 is called the House process. The inventor, Mr. House, of the Forest 

 Department, Melbourne, states that the process comprises an insulated 

 chamber, into which the stacked timber is run on trucks, and subjected 

 to moist and dry heat from a system of steam pipes and cells, the tem- 

 perature and humidity being regulated by drop doors and ventilators. 

 The chamber and its accessories form practically an easily adjustable 

 machine, saturating the timber, washing out the free water in the cells 

 and the chemicals in the sap of green timber, and so doing nature's 

 work of five years in about a fortnight. ISTaturally the time required 

 for drying varies with the thickness of the timber— twelve days sufficing 

 for 1-in. planks and up to sixteen days being required for planks of a 

 thickness up to 1] inches. Personally I know little of this process, but 

 Mr. J. Mann, of the University Engineering School (an expert regarding 

 timber matters), says, " The timber dried in this manner does not appear 

 to be damaged in any way, the colour being good and the fibres normal. 



