Unlike house ants, fleas or bedbugs, these pests are not so well known to housewives. Therefore, even if they are noticed at home, they do not always sound the alarm, mistaking them for a bug that has accidentally crawled into the house. Let's figure out what skin beetles look like, how to find them in your apartment and get rid of them once and for all.
Description of the pest
The carpet beetle belongs to the large family of Coleoptera insects, which has approximately 600 species. Adults range in size from 1.3 to 12 mm. The body is oval, almost round or elongated, with a convex top and a small head, covered with tiny hairs. The color depends on the variety.
The female skin beetle lays clutches of milky-white oval eggs that turn yellow with further development. The hatched larvae look like hairy caterpillars of gray, yellowish, brown color. They are mobile and actively feed at any time of the day, gnawing holes up to 10 centimeters long in the substrate in which they live.
The beetles are fertile; the female lays several hundred eggs during her life. In nature, they reproduce 1-2 times a year, but during this time 4 generations of insects can appear in a human home. At the same time, getting rid of the skin beetle is quite difficult. In the absence of food, spraying with insecticides or low air temperatures, pests plunge into a state of diapause (inhibition of physiological processes), in which they can remain for up to 4–5 years.
What are carpet beetles?
The name carpet beetle tells you almost everything you need to know about these little creatures.
These bugs are well known for infesting clothing, carpets, upholstery and just about anything you need to walk on barefoot.
Even worse, they not only infest your carpet, but lay eggs and reproduce in it.
You don't know you have carpet beetles until you come across them. So, here's everything you need to know about them.
There are several types of carpet beetles, all of them oval in shape.
They also vary in color depending on their maturity and type of species.
The most common carpet beetles are the black bark beetle.
The black bark beetle feeds on fabric and food items such as grain. They are dark brown to black in color and bullet shaped.
A variety of carpet beetles feed on dead insects and other fibrous material.
In the adult stage, they reach approximately 2-3 mm in length and have wings covered with white, brown and yellow spots.
So they have a more or less spotted appearance.
The common bark beetle is also known as the "Cow Carpet Beetle" and feeds on any material made from animal by-products.
And their shell is covered with black and white patterned scales, and they also have scales along the middle of the shell.
Carpet beetle indoors
Routes of penetration
Flying bugs can easily enter your home through open windows. They can also be brought into housing with contaminated things or food, on clothes and shoes, or with a bouquet of flowers.
Danger to humans
Insects do not feed on blood, so they do not attack people, but they can accidentally bite. And since pests often live on decaying remains, they serve as carriers of dangerous infections and helminth eggs. In addition, their bites can provoke a severe allergic reaction. Allergies or infections can also be caused by excrement and particles of chitin that enter the body through the mouth or respiratory tract.
Cold air is the main enemy of insects!
Yes, our grandparents also knew that every small nasty thing that is an insect is afraid of cold temperatures, and the carpet beetle is no exception!
Absolutely all household linen that was used during the period of incubation of the parasite must be frozen for several hours: a balcony is suitable for this in the cold season (the temperature should not be higher than nine degrees Celsius), or your freezer if it is moderately warm outside.
It is recommended to “freeze” the apartment - leave all the windows open for the whole day so that the temperature becomes as low as possible. The parasites will definitely not survive such tests, and all you have to do is vacuum thoroughly again.
“Freezing” must be carried out only after completing the step with boric acid, since otherwise the beetles will simply be able to safely escape from your apartment.
IMPORTANT:
it is recommended to use all the tips clearly point by point, and combine methods for getting rid of carpet beetles together: this way you can achieve the most favorable result, and also forget about this annoying parasite forever!
Useful tips for fighting carpet beetles:
- If you live in a private house, it is recommended to get rid of bird nests next to it, since there is a high probability that these nests have become a hotbed of incubation for parasites.
- If you find carpet beetles in your apartment, you must immediately limit their access to things that are dear to you: starch them, place them in the above-mentioned vacuum bags.
Don't forget that traditional methods don't always have the maximum impact. For the best disinfestation, you need to soberly assess the scale of insect reproduction in your apartment. The above recommendations will be most effective at its minimum and medium levels.
Carpet beetle in an apartment - how to detect the pest
Insects prefer dark, warm, dry places. They can live:
- behind heating appliances;
- in upholstered furniture, beds, curtains and curtains;
- under baseboards, window sills, behind door jambs and window frames;
- in the trash can;
- behind the paintings;
- in decorative jewelry made of fabric and leather.
In the house, the skin beetle can be detected by marks on things and bristly coverings shed during molting. The larvae are most easily seen in flour, cereals and other foods.
Common mistakes when fighting skin beetles
When studying the question of how to deal with skin beetles in a house or apartment, the mistakes that inexperienced housewives often make must be taken into account. Such nuances often nullify all efforts made to exterminate the skin beetle.
- Insufficiently thorough processing.
A large area must be treated - the entire floor, and interior items, furniture, to a height of at least 1.5 meters. As a rule, beetles are limited to this zone. Spot treatment of any individual areas will not bring the desired effect.
- Ignoring the processing frequency.
Most of the compounds used to get rid of skin beetles can have an effect on adult representatives of the species and larvae. But they can’t cope with eggs. Some time after the measures taken, a new generation will emerge from these eggs. After the first treatment, another one must be carried out.
- Failure to comply with drug dosage recommendations.
Fearing the toxicity of the chemical composition used during exposure, many owners dilute the drugs not in the dosage prescribed in the instructions, but in a much smaller one. Such negligence will result in serious consequences. It will be possible to destroy only the most weakened individuals. Those representatives who turned out to be stronger not only survive, but also become immune to this drug.
Advice! If one of your family members is diagnosed with asthma or often experiences allergic reactions, it is better to turn to folk remedies. Wet cleaning is required.
If the measures taken turn out to be ineffective, then the tenant with health problems will have to be relocated to relatives for some period. During this time, the apartment is carefully processed.
Main varieties
The most common types of skin beetles found in homes and businesses are:
- Ham
– a black beetle up to 8 mm long; a wide gray stripe with several dark dots is visible on the elytra. Omnivorous, actively feeds in the larval and adult states. Found in meat and fish products, leather, fur, grain, it poses a particular danger to food industry enterprises. - Brownie
– an oval variegated bug measuring 1.5–3 mm. It feeds on meat products, felt, and wool. - Carpet
– a black or brown insect, 4–5 mm long. Damages knitted and woolen clothing, carpets, down products, fur, flour, cereals, and grain. - Fur coat
– a black-brown beetle up to 6 mm in size with five characteristic light spots on the back. It starts mainly in dressing rooms, among things made of wool, fur and down.
To know for sure whether a bug found in the house poses a danger to clothing or cereal supplies, it is recommended to study the skin beetle using photos and descriptions. Then, having noticed pests, apartment owners or company management will be able to begin combating them in a timely manner, which will minimize the damage.
Prevention of the appearance of surviving bugs and their larvae
In most cases, after baiting, individual beetles, and especially the smallest larvae, almost invisible to the naked eye, can survive in places where they were simply not found and not treated with an insecticide. They can safely remain here, lay eggs, or grow and pupate. And while they are in these inconspicuous places, no one will see them, and the owners of the apartment will think that they are not in the room. But either older larvae, which will exhaust food sources and will be forced to crawl away in search of new ones, or beetles, which will look for mating partners, will sooner or later get out of these shelters and begin to catch the eye.
Our experience
According to reviews and surveys of our clients, after disinfestation, no one encountered a single skin beetle in the house for 4 months. Of the 413 treatments that we carried out against these insects, 6 people (1.5%) met single individuals six months to a year after disinfestation, and it is impossible to say with confidence whether these were insects that survived the persecution, or new ones that entered the apartment after extermination. Be that as it may, in all six cases, single individuals were caught, which were easily destroyed by hand. There was no talk of any mass reproduction of skin beetles in the apartment after such persecution.
The photo below shows an unfolded litter with a whole cluster of skin beetle larvae:
At a minimum, to passively destroy them, it is enough to sprinkle all the cracks behind the baseboards, the joints of the edges of the flooring and the bottom of the walls in the room with some insecticidal powder. Hector or Ecokiller are suitable for this - they retain their effectiveness as long as they remain dry, and behind the same baseboards they will kill leather beetles a month, two, and six months after they are poured here.
It is enough to simply kill all the beetles that come into view after this, and the larvae with your own hands. After thorough baiting, there should not be many of them left in the room, and this way you can manually kill off all the surviving pests.
How to remove skin beetle
To control insects you can use:
- Folk methods
. Beetles are afraid of strong odors, so in everyday life a solution of vinegar, essential oils and bunches of dry odorous plants are often used against them. However, such treatment against skin beetles is ineffective and can only be used to prevent the appearance of pests. - Physical methods
. Freezing contaminated items, washing at temperatures above 60oC, treating with hot steam, cleaning with a vacuum cleaner and damp rags will help prevent infection or even destroy a small population of insects. - Chemical methods
. The industry offers a large selection of products in the form of powders, tablets, solutions, aerosols, and fumigators. But getting rid of pests using household products is quite difficult, because the beetles are resistant to insecticides. Careful repeated processing is necessary, otherwise surviving individuals will quickly reproduce and restore the population.
How and with what can you destroy discovered insects?
Where leather beetles can be found, they can be destroyed in a variety of ways.
The simplest, most reliable and fastest way is to treat the area of the accumulation with an insecticide solution . Carpet beetles are sensitive to most products that can be used at home; even relatively inexpensive spray cans are effective against them.
According to our observations, skin beetles are most reliably destroyed by preparations based on organophosphorus compounds, which we use to bait bedbugs. Among household drugs, such drugs include Karbofos, Executioner and Forsyth, Get Total. Lambda-cyhalothrin-based products are also very effective (Lambda-Zone, Paragraph), but they must be used with great caution due to their acute effects, including on people and pets.
In principle, skin beetles can be destroyed using a steam generator or steam cleaner. They quickly die under a stream of steam, even if the grain in which they are located is processed with such a stream. Although, it is easier to throw out infected cereals with them than to eradicate insects from it.
It is possible that beetles and their larvae found in places where there are accumulations can be destroyed using folk remedies, but we do not know exactly how effective any of them are. We assume that vinegar or denatured alcohol will kill these insects immediately upon first contact with these products, but in our practice we do not use such folk remedies, since high-quality insecticides are safer, do not stink as much and give a much more reliable result.
In those places where beetles and larvae of leather beetles are found singly, it is easier to simply catch them and crush them with your fingers. It's faster and more reliable. True, these places themselves will definitely need to be treated with an insecticide: if insects ended up here once, then some individuals that survived in the room will probably climb here again. And if poison awaits them here, then this journey through the apartment will be their last.
When we poison bedbugs, we treat with an insecticidal preparation not only the places where skin beetles accumulate and meet, but generally all the surfaces in the room where these insects may be found. This guarantees that after disinfestation, any surface will be a continuous minefield for leather beetles, and even if some insects could not be destroyed immediately, they are guaranteed to die if they try to crawl anywhere.
In addition, continuous spraying allows you to reach skin beetles where they cannot be seen. For example, in the form of a cold mist, the insecticide is blown into narrow cracks behind sliding wardrobes, under laminate flooring, behind non-removable trims and door frames. Here, insects cannot be destroyed manually and they cannot be removed from here by anything, but a fine insecticidal mist is blown in here very effectively and settles on the entire internal surface of such cracks and cavities. Due to this, all insects here are destroyed during the processing itself.
Cold fog treatment
It is almost impossible for the owner of the premises to treat the apartment with a spray bottle on a bottle as tightly as a master does with a cold fog generator. Because of this, you can poison skin beetles yourself only in the most accessible places, and if they hide in places where you can’t get them, then the treatment has to be repeated many times, and it is not always possible to remove skin beetles even after 4-5 such disinsections with your own hands.
That is why, after professional pest control, you can safely forget about skin beetles and not take any further measures, since the professional methods and means themselves guarantee that there will be no more insects in the apartment. And after destroying them on your own, you also need to work on finishing off the individual surviving pests.
Pest control services
Apartment owners who are not confident in their abilities can turn to professionals for help. Disinsection against annoying skin beetles is carried out by special services. Employees of such companies have all the necessary arsenal to exterminate parasites. This is not only special equipment and destructive means, but also possession of certain knowledge and skills.
The problem will be resolved as soon as possible. Objects and property treated during disinfestation will be reliably protected for a long period from such a disaster.
Rating of pest control companies
We suggest that you familiarize yourself with the rating of companies from which you can order disinfestation against skin beetles in an apartment, at home, or in domestic premises. The website provides up-to-date information, contact details, and estimated cost of services.
Habitats of different species
The museum leather beetle can be found on stuffed birds and animals, leather bindings of book volumes, natural fabrics and paintings. Workers at museums and exhibitions most often encounter this species. Adult beetles do not cause harm, but they lay eggs, from which voracious larvae then hatch. Adults can be seen on flowers, and larvae can be seen on dried corpses of mammals.
The kapra beetle from the genus Granivorous leather beetles lives in cereals, dried fruits, nuts, and feeds on meat and cheese reserves. This is a dangerous quarantine pest. Its homeland is India, from where, along with trade goods, it spread throughout the world. The insect prefers areas with a warm climate and breeds in granaries and food warehouses.
Spotted skin beetles are found on mammal carcasses. They are used to clean bones in museums. These insects are kept in special rooms called dermestariums. Beetle larvae can spoil food supplies of fish, meat, milk powder, and cheese. Pests are found in museums and silk production plants.
Ham skin beetles live everywhere. The larvae are practically omnivorous - they eat containers, telephone wires, wood, paper, leather, etc. They are used by taxidermists to clean skeletons. Insects are found in bird nests, burrows of wild animals, and food warehouses.
The fur coat beetle lives in apartments; its appearance may be caused by the abundance of dust on which it feeds. It can be found under baseboards, in carpets, under sofas, in cracks on the floor and furniture, and in closets. He shares an apartment with a carpet beetle - a big lover of leather, fur and house dust. These beetles eat feathers and down in pillows, blankets and duvets, spoil things, stocks of cereals, flour and plant products.
Damage caused by skin beetles
Skin beetle.
If skin beetles are found in premises, immediate measures must be taken to destroy them.
- Different types of leather beetles damage crops, furniture, and wallpaper.
- They eat food products such as dry meat, dried fish, and cereals.
- Items made from natural materials, wool, silk, fur, feather pillows and blankets are also damaged by the leather beetle.
For the larvae of this beetle, there are very few things that they will not feed on.
