of insecticide via hypodermic needle. Alternatively, where a degree of damage to the fabric of a building is acceptable, larger 6 mm holes can be drilled deep into the timbers, and a thick, insecticide-laden paste introduced which does not seep out into surrounding areas. In all situations, any structural damage which has permitted water to ingress and moisten the timbers now being attacked should be addressed in order to slow down the life cycle of the insects, and thus minimize their spread. In culture The tapping sound of the deathwatch beetle has long been associated as a harbinger of death, being most audible on quiet nights in the rafters of old houses, and in silent bedside vigils for the dying. The English writer, physician, and naturalist Thomas Browne (1605-1682) attempted to correct misconceptions about the deathwatch beetle as an omen of death in his encyclopedic catalog of common errors, Pseudodoxia Epidemica: Its notoriety as an ill omen is alluded to in the fourth book of John Keats' 1818 poem "Endymion": The term "death watch" has been applied to a variety of other ticking insects, including Anobium striatum; some of the so-called booklice of the family Psocidae, and the appropriately named Atropos divinatoria and Clothilla pulsatoria (in Greek mythology Atropos and Clotho were two of the three moirai (Fates) associated with death). In 1838 Henry David Thoreau published an essay mentioning the deathwatch beetle. It is possible that this essay influenced Edgar Allan Poe's 1843 short story "The Tell-Tale Heart" and that the sound the protagonist was hearing at the end of that story was that of a beetle tapping inside the wall, not the beating of the (dead) victim's heart. However, it is more likely that it was the metronomic ticking of a booklouse rather than the groups of six to eight taps made by the deathwatch beetle. The beetle was referenced in Mark Twain's 1876 The Adventures of Tom Sawyer: "Next the ghastly ticking of a deathwatch in the wall at the bed's head made Tom shudder – it meant that somebody's days were numbered." Even Beatrix Potter references the beetle in her children's book The Tailor of Gloucester (written 1901, published 1903) when the mice under the tea-cups start up "a chorus of little tappings, all sounding together, and answering one another, like watch-beetles in an old worm-eaten window-shutter—". In Dorothy L. Sayers' Gaudy Night (chapter 17), the