By Christy Solo – ONPA 1st Place Award Winner for Best Local Column
Not surprisingly we’re going to kick off this week’s Crawlies with, “Don’t panic!”
Yes, our featured critter is a varied carpet beetle (Anthrenus verbasci) generally considered a “pest” insect.
But – what makes an insect a “pest” or a “beneficial” critter? In the case of the varied, it’s “Location, location, location!”
Outdoors – yes even in our gardens – these bitty (3mm AKA teeny AKA under one-quarter of an inch AKA 0.118 of an inch) beetles are capital “B” beneficial. When they wander indoors, they might lay waste to your wool hat.
To be fair, they have no concept of “indoors and outdoors” they just want pollen and some discarded bird feathers and dead insects – especially dead mosquitoes, they really love those.
Adult varied are little pollen munching machines, which as we’ve learned means they are petite pollinators. Like flies and other “non-bee” pollinators varied pollenate not by packing on the pollen and moving it from flower to flower, but by just picking it up incidentally on their bodies as the dine.
As you can see in our close-up photo of a varied carpet beetle, there is a lot of texture to the miniscule scales covering their elytra (hard wing covers), perfect for pollen to adhere to. As the varied walks or flies from flower to flower they move that pollen along, dropping some off and picking some up.
Their diminutive size also allows them to pollinate very small blooms as well as larger ones.
What about the kiddos? While you don’t want varied carpet beetle larvae in your house, outdoors they are little cleaning machines. Females will lay eggs in old bird’s nests, near bat roosts and around spider webs to name a few places.
Outdoors the larvae eat keratin (bird feathers and shed hair from mammals) and chitin (exoskeletons of dead arthropods).
Indoors they’ll eat the same foods, but those are usually in the form of clothing versus detritus. Indoors they have also adapted to eat some grains.
The good news is it’s generally easy to spot them indoors, despite their small size. Adults come out of hibernation in early spring, and if one snoozed away the winter in your home, they will immediately head for the light when they wake up. Keep an eye on your windows and flooring by sliding glass doors, that’s where they’ll be.
The varied in our close-up photo was on the wall in the smallest bathroom in my parents’ house in Trail. The adults must have liked the garden area just outside that bathroom because I’d frequently find one adult in that same bathroom during the first week of spring.
Only one time in nine years did one lay eggs indoors and one small wool dog coat tucked way in the back of a laundry room drawer met its end.
As a rule if a varied lays eggs indoors, it will be someplace dark, quiet and secluded. Like the very back of that drawer where I’d completely forgotten I left a dog coat – then put a bunch of other items in front of and on top of the coat.
As you can see by the photo of a massive Pollen Party on the Queen Anne’s Lace, I have lots of varied in my new yard. Clearly they also have no shortage of dark quiet places outdoors in which to lay their eggs because I’ve yet to find one inside.
So…don’t panic. But do store your woolens someplace more savvy than “in the back of a laundry room drawer under a bunch of other stuff.”
