Carpet Beetles; confused?

Naf

We keep finding the odd adult carpet beetles about the upstairs. We've not seen many; maybe 5 this year in total. But my wife found two in the laundry pile this morning which has prompted us to search through all our clothing and I'm not sure what to make of what we've found.

• No adults; not a single one anywhere.
• One solitary larva on a wool/lycra suit with no holes eaten at all
• Lots of holes (presuming eaten) on my old 100% wool suit; but not a single larva or casing to be found
• Solitary casings here & there with no other signs of activity (no droppings or other holes eaten).

Practically every casing was already powdery & just disintegrated.
I'm just puzzled as there doesn't seem to be any particular concentration of them anywhere, barely any signs of current life, and the casings seem to be pretty old (how long do they take to get that dry they just crumble?).
Obviously we're on a campaign to get stuff washed & hoovered; but does it even seem like we have much of a problem? I would have thought I'd expect to find a lot more if we had a current infestation...?

anotherbaldrick

sounds more like moths than carpet beetles.

Biggles

If you have a wool carpet, have you moved furniture and looked underneath?

Naf

anotherbaldrick wrote: »

sounds more like moths than carpet beetles.

Definitely carpet beetles; have found one larva and various casings which match.

Biggles wrote: »

If you have a wool carpet, have you moved furniture and looked underneath?

Carpet is all plastic.

cyclonebri1

Naf wrote: »

Definitely carpet beetles; have found one larva and various casings which match.



Carpet is all plastic.

Then you are in with a chance, we had wool carpets and at the time the top floor wasn't being used.

I happened to be up there and dropped something small. As I was scratting about for it I realised the floor was moving.

They had ate the whole upstairs carpeting, 2 bedrooms, bathroom and were making a start down the open stairs carpet. I thing it was only the fact that the stair treads were seperate that held them back a little.
Not covered under insurance of cause, down to vermin attack.

The cause we think was one old item of carpet that showed just two holes, they liked the carpet better once they got settled. We were told it was simply a form of moth, not carpet beetles.

Total rip-out and replacement plus fumigation and insectecutor installed, not cheap.


Anyway, message is sort it fast