Furniture Beetles. 7 



more by accident than otherwise. Tliey are mostly drilled by the 

 beetles themselves, in order to make their exit from the wood. 

 The width of each hole may, therefore, be taken as a fairly 

 accurate measure of the width of body of the beetle that made 

 it. Those made by the death-watch beetles have on an average 

 nearly twice the diameter of the holes made by the other species 

 of furniture beetles, and the powder is characterised by the 

 peculiarly rounded plano-convex or bun-shaped form of the pellets 

 or grains of which it is in great part composed. The pellets are 

 the excrement of the larvae. 



When the wood of furniture is one of the less hard kinds, 

 and worm-holes of less than a line in diameter appear in it, 

 the common furniture beetle may generally be suspected as the 

 species concerned in their making ; but sometimes Piilinus 

 pectinicornis, L. (see Fig. 4), a species of a little larger size and 

 more cylindrical form, distinguished according to sex by the 

 comb-like or beautifully branched structure of the antennae or 

 feelers to be seen projecting from its head, turns out to be the 

 author of the damage. 



If, however, worm-holes which look like those of the common 

 furniture beetle begin to appear in furniture that is new, or at 

 least not many years old, and made of such wood as oak, ash or 

 walnut, though not of pine-wood, it will then very often be found 

 that the holes had been made by one or other of the two Lyctid 

 species of furniture beetle. The Lyctidae are widely known in 

 America by the name of powder-post beetles. They do not attack 

 the wood of coniferous trees, but are very destructive to wood of 

 various other kinds, especially after it has been seasoned a few 

 years and the sap has become quite dry. They begin always by 

 attacking the sap-wood, which they prefer, and rarely penetrate 

 quite into the heart of the wood. In a remarkably short time they 

 convert almost the whole of the sap-wood into a very fine powder. 

 Of the two species which occur in this country, one, which used 

 to be less common, now appears to be the more widely spread, 

 and to be spreading more and more as time goes on. In recent 

 years several instances have been brought to our notice in which 

 panelling of oak, walnut or sycamore, and furniture made of the 

 same woods or ash, have suffered Very serious damage from the 

 larvae of this species. The beetles abound in several timber yards 

 in London, and doubtless in many others throughout the country. 

 In some cases large stacks of wood have been in great part 

 destroyed by them. 



