Bugs in Firewood: How to Keep Them Out of Your Home This Winter

Your firewood pile is a winter hotel for bugs. Beetles, ants, spiders, centipedes, and even termites shelter in stacked wood, and when you carry a log into a warm house, whatever is hiding inside can wake up and wander off. The good news: a few simple storage habits keep almost all of them outside. Here’s what lives in firewood, which bugs actually matter, and how to store and bring in wood the right way this fireplace season.

What Lives in Firewood

Extension entomologists list a surprisingly long roster of insects tied to firewood. The ones Middle Tennessee homeowners are most likely to meet:

• Wood-boring beetles, including longhorned beetles, metallic wood-boring beetles, and bark beetles, which live under the bark or inside the wood
• Carpenter ants, which nest in damp or rotting wood
• Termites, which can move into wood that touches the soil
• Spiders, including black widows, which like the shelter of woodpiles
• Pillbugs, centipedes, millipedes, and ground beetles that hide in the damp, dark spaces between logs
• Mice, which nest in and under stacked wood

Which Firewood Bugs Actually Matter

Most bugs that ride in on firewood are a short-lived nuisance. They emerge, can’t survive long in a dry, heated house, and die off. A few deserve more attention:

• Termites and carpenter ants: the real risk is a woodpile stacked against your house, which can give them a bridge to your structure. Learn about our termite control and ant control.
• Black widows and brown recluses: both like undisturbed woodpiles and stacked materials. Wear gloves when you grab logs, and look before you reach. Our black widow guide shows what to look for.
• Mice: a woodpile next to the house is a perfect staging area for rodents moving indoors in the fall. Here’s how to tell mice from rats.

How to Store Firewood to Keep Bugs Out

• Keep it away from the house. Many pest professionals recommend stacking firewood at least 20 feet from your home, never against an exterior wall.
• Get it off the ground. Use a rack, cinder blocks, or pallets so air circulates and soil-dwelling insects like termites can’t climb right in.
• Keep it dry. Cover the top with a tarp or store it in a woodshed, but leave the sides open so it can dry. Dry wood attracts fewer insects and burns better.
• Don’t store it indoors. Not in the house, basement, or garage. Insects and rodents can move out of the pile and into the structure.
• Burn the oldest wood first and rotate your stack as you add to it.

How to Bring Firewood Inside

• Only bring in what you’ll burn soon, ideally that day or the next. Wood that sits by a warm fireplace for a week gives hidden insects time to wake up.
• Knock logs together outside to shake loose anything hiding, and brush off any bugs you see.
• Use a log carrier or tray to contain bark and debris, and sweep up afterward.
• Wear gloves to protect your hands from splinters and spiders.

Never Spray Firewood With Insecticide

It’s tempting to spray a buggy woodpile, but don’t. Burning wood that’s been treated with insecticide can release harmful fumes into your home. Storage and handling habits are the safe, effective way to keep firewood bugs under control.

Buy and Burn Local

Some insects hiding in firewood aren’t just household nuisances. Invasive beetles can hitchhike to new areas in firewood and damage trees there. Buy or gather firewood close to where you’ll burn it, and never haul it long distances, including on camping trips.

Found Bugs Coming Out of Your Firewood?

Don’t panic. A few beetles or ants crawling out of a log usually die off quickly indoors, and burning the wood they came from ends the problem. But if you’re seeing ants, spiders, or rodents beyond the fireplace area, the woodpile may have given them a way into your home. Our pest control covers the spiders, ants, and occasional invaders that come in with the cold, and our rodent control handles mice and rats.

Firewood Bug FAQs

Sources: University of Florida IFAS Extension, Avoid Firewood Pests and Iowa State University Extension.

Keep Winter Pests Outside

Call 615-590-1260 or schedule a free inspection, and a Pest Pro will help you keep firewood pests, and everything else the cold drives in, where they belong.