Carpet beetles have a wide variety in their diet, and carpet is just one of the many things they eat. Today’s post is all about Carpet Beetles, facts, prevention, and removal.
What do carpet beetles eat?
Carpet beetles have a wide variety of things that they eat, and interestingly enough, sometimes they won’t even eat carpet. Typically they like to feed off of animal based products. Today’s carpet is made from synthetic materials that carpet beetles won’t eat.
However, this isn’t a 100% rule for them as sometimes they do eat synthetic materials if they have a good layer of “seasoning” on them. If synthetic materials have been coated in things like sweat, oil, or food, carpet beetles have been known to make an exception to their eating habits.
Their non-synthetic material diet usually consists of things like animal furs, silk, leather, wool, and other animal based products. This can lead them to infest areas around your home far beyond just carpet.
Carpet beetle larva is usually the cause of most damage around your home. The adult forms of carpet beetles typically will feed on pollen or nectar from outdoor sources. Adult carpet beetles have been know to occasionally feed from dried food products like four and rice.
Adult carpet beetles most often lay their eggs where their larva will have an abundant access to food sources.
Carpet beetle prevention tips
Carpet beetles can be very hard to spot and find around your home. They like to hide in dark places and in cracks and crevices in carpets, furniture, and upholstery. They also can live in attics, under floor boards, and in vents around your home.
Their early stages of eggs and pupal can be very difficult if not impossible to notice and a carpet beetle infestation can become widespread very quickly.
Since adult carpet beetles can fly as well as lay up to 100 eggs at a time, they can spread fast and cause an infestation in a relatively short period of time.
Prevention should be focused on keeping your clothes sealed in plastic containers when stored. You can dry clean clothes and then store them in closed containers where the beetles can’t get to.
Also as with most pest prevention, be sure to store your food in sealed containers as adult carpet beetles are known to feed on grains, flour, rice, and other dried goods.
Carpet beetles usually enter the home through openings along windows and doors. Exclusion should be a priority around your home for most pests, but especially with carpet beetles.
This means checking all possible entry points and fixing window screens, removing gaps under closed windows with weather stripping, and installing door sweeps as some basic methods of exclusion.
Another one of the most common food sources for carpet beetles is pet hair, so cleaning up after your pets can be another form of prevention. Frequent vacuuming can help to eliminate food sources for these pests.
Carpet beetle removal beyond proper sealing and clean up
Unfortunately, removal of carpet beetles on your own can be very difficult, and in most cases, you will need to hire a pest control service to eliminate them from your home. Detection of carpet beetles is rare in the early stages as larva and pupa stages are very tiny and hard to see around your home.
It’s usually too late once you start to notice signs of carpet beetles, and in most cases you already have an infestation on your hands. The best avenue for home ready involves throwing away damaged clothing, furniture, dry cleaning, and other things infested by carpet beetles.
Full removal of carpet beetles may take multiple crack and crevice treatments from a pest control service to kill active stages of the pests and to set up a long term prevention program as well in order to keep them from coming back.
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