Can woodworm travel in sawdust?

[michael]

I’ve recently been sawing up some reclaimed floor boards that I found in a junk yard in order to salvage the good bits and discard the bad bits that had been badly eaten by worm. This generally meant loosing maybe a foot or two in every ten foot of board. The Salvaged lengths were then all treated thoroughly before use. The discarded cut offs were bagged up and disposed of.
This sawing was done in a large room in my house that I am temporarily using as a workshop and this room itself has relatively old bare pine boards or boards that have a coat of worn varnish. Whilst sawing the boards up with my circular power saw, I obviously dropped a fair bit of saw dust onto this floor and it made me suddenly wonder could the sawdust from the worm infected timber cause re infestation in my existing floor.

Even though I vacuum up thoroughly after sawing, I’m sure some of the dust gets down between the floorboard gaps.

Is there any cause for concern?

 

[Matt Green]

Is there any cause for concern?

About furniture beetle? No.
About your paranoia? ermmm... :shock:

Seriously, sleep well in your bed without Lovecraftian dreams of The Worms in the Boards:

You'd see the larvae for one.

For two, there probably weren't any in the boards you had anyway, the boards may have shown damage and the insects long gone.

For three, you chopped the ends off, rather than trimmed them lengthways, this means water uptake through the end grain caused the moisture content of the boards to rise leading to insect attack. That suggests wood-boring weevil damage rather than furniture beetle (or both, just an observtaion that furniture beetle attack sapwood edges whilst weevils tend to go for wet, soft wood, usually in ground/masonry contact).

As long as the boards were decent quality and you kept them dry the risk of fresh attack is really, really low unless you laid them somewhere silly. So the treatment was probably overkill too, especially as the boards were reclaimed and likely contained a lot of heartwood that furniture beetles cannot consume unless modified by fungus.

Still, I bet they look great. Admire your work and don't worry.


Matt.