Borer Treatment Available In Dunedin
- 24/7 rapid response
- Licensed and insured
- Locally owned and operated
Providing Residential and Commercial Borer Treatment Since 2007
Spotted small round holes in your weatherboards or floor timbers with fine sawdust around them? That’s borer, and it’s more than just a cosmetic issue. These wood-boring beetles spend years silently eating through the timber structure of your home, weakening beams, joists, and floorboards. By the time you notice the flight holes on the surface, there’s often extensive damage hidden inside the timber. We provide comprehensive borer pest control across the South Island, helping property owners protect their most valuable asset from these destructive insects.
Borer doesn’t announce itself until it’s already caused damage. The beetles lay eggs on bare timber, the larvae burrow inside and spend 3 to 10 years eating their way through the wood, then emerge as adults leaving those telltale holes behind. Without proper borer control, the cycle just continues, with each generation weakening the timber further.
Why Surface Sprays Don’t Work
The problem with borer is that they’re not on the surface, they’re deep inside your timber. A quick spray from the hardware store might kill a few adult beetles, but it won’t touch the larvae that are actually eating away at your structure.
Aerosol bombs and fogging treatments have the same limitation. They’ll kill adult beetles flying around during summer months, but the real damage is being done by larvae buried in the timber where these products simply can’t reach.
Effective timber borer treatment needs to penetrate into the wood itself and remain active for longer than the borer lifecycle. Because some species spend up to 10 years as larvae inside the timber, the treatment needs to last at least that long to completely break the cycle. This type of wood borer treatment can only be applied to bare timber, which is why painted or varnished surfaces require a different approach.
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Our Borer Extermination Process
Borer beetle treatment isn’t one-size-fits-all. The method depends on whether the timber is bare or coated, how extensive the infestation is, and what species of borer we’re dealing with. We’ll come and inspect your property and give you a written report. The cost for this is $100, which will be deducted off your treatment costs if you go ahead.
Inspection & Report
We start with a thorough inspection of your timber to assess the infestation extent. Borer often attacks from inside the boards, so a few visible holes might hide severe interior damage. We’ll explain our findings in detail so you understand exactly what’s needed to protect your property.
Bare Timber Treatment
For exposed timber, we apply a borate spray using professional-grade insecticide. This penetrates into the wood, killing existing larvae and preventing adult beetles from laying new eggs. The treatment remains active for years, outlasting the borer lifecycle.
Coated Timber Treatment
When timber has been painted or varnished, surface treatments won’t penetrate. We use pressure injection, treating each visible flight hole with residual insecticide. The product spreads through the larvae tunnels, eliminating borers within your timber.
Prevention Advice
After treatment, we’ll discuss ways to make your property less attractive to borer. Improving subfloor ventilation, fixing plumbing leaks, and sealing roof leaks all help prevent future infestations, as these beetles prefer damp timber.
Recognising Borer In Your Property
Borer in your property’s timber usually looks like small holes (2 to 4mm) on the surface with fine sawdust around them. If left untreated, it can weaken the timber structures of your property and cause serious problems that eventually require replacing entire sections of weatherboards, floorboards, or structural beams.
Common house borer and native borer are the most widespread species, preferring softer sapwood timber. You’ll often see holes clustered in some parts of a weatherboard but not others, because the attacked sections are the softer sapwood while the harder heartwood remains untouched. Two-toothed longhorn borer is less common but more serious, as it attacks heartwood structural timbers and creates larger oval holes up to 7mm.
Borer prefer damp conditions, which is why subfloors and the south side of buildings are often hit hardest. They’re particularly fond of untreated native timbers in older homes. The adult beetles fly during warm weather from November through to March, looking for bare timber or old flight holes where they can lay eggs. Each female can lay up to 100 eggs, and once those larvae hatch and burrow into the wood, they’ll spend years eating through it before emerging to start the cycle again.
Our borer treatment across the South Island has been refined over nearly two decades of protecting properties from these destructive pests. Want to safeguard the timber in your home or business from borer, get in touch with our friendly team at Pest Specialists.
Frequently Asked Questions
The inspection costs $100, and we’ll provide you with a detailed written report on the extent of the infestation and what treatment is needed. If you decide to go ahead with treatment, we deduct the $100 inspection fee from your treatment costs.
Yes, but it requires a different method. We use pressure injection to treat each flight hole individually, forcing insecticide into the tunnels inside the timber. For extensive infestations in weatherboards, sometimes the best long-term solution is replacing the affected boards and treating the framing timber behind them while the wall is open.
Our residual treatments are designed to remain effective for 10 years or more. This is essential because borer larvae can spend up to a decade inside the timber before emerging as adults.
You might see some post-treatment emergence for a year or two. These are beetles that were already well-developed larvae when the treatment was applied, and they’ll complete their lifecycle and exit the timber. However, any eggs they lay on treated timber won’t survive, which breaks the infestation cycle.
Not as a long-term solution. Foggers and bombs will kill adult beetles that are flying around during summer, but they don’t penetrate into the timber where the larvae are actually doing the damage. They’re only useful as part of a broader treatment strategy, not as a standalone fix.
It depends on how severe the structural damage is. If beams, joists, or other load-bearing timber has been significantly weakened, replacement is often the safest option. We’ll assess this during the inspection and let you know if replacement is necessary or if treatment alone will be sufficient.
