blue stain in pine - make it stop!

[Engineer]

Short & sweet:  I cut 17000 board feet of eastern white pine logs in March 2004, didn't get a chance to mill them until last week.  The timbers I got from the heartwood are pretty much normal, but most of the boards (I'm estimating 3500 board feet) are in various stages of decay, from blue stain, to black, to yellow slimy stuff on a couple, and quite a few worm holes and live worms.  It's almost all sapwood, the pieces that are heartwood seem to be unaffected by both the stain and the worms.

Right now, all of it is stacked and stickered properly, by properly I mean stickers max 30" o.c. green pine (had nothing else) and I made sure the stack was straight and even, all the cribbing was shimmed and in the same plane.  I am curious if the blue stain will "stop", i.e. will the boards continue to turn black, or will some air exposure stop the fungus from spreading? I plan on kiln-drying all of it eventually, later this fall or early winter, as most of it will become flooring and trim for my house.  I don't mind the color of the blue stain so much as I worry if the kiln or air drying process will make the decay process and the bugs and works go away.

Alternately, anybody wanna buy a few thousand feet of 5/4 x 10 x 16' green pine?    

[Tom]

My guess is that the Blue Stain will stop as it dries.  The black colored stain is, more than likely, mildew.  It can only be stopped by drying and must be killed by a fungicide or it will take off again when the wood gets wet. This is my experience from SYP.  

If you don't mind bug holes then you will probably be able to ue the buggy stuff.  A lot of what will appear to be unusable will harden up as it dries.  The green/wet stickers aren't going to help matters any.

This is where it pays to get rid of the sawdust from the boards.  Sawdust is bad for mildewing and, at the least, will shadow the wood with sawdust stain.

I have used a 3:1 laundry bleach and water solution in a garden sprayer to knock back mildew as i'm stacking wood.  Officially you will be told that it won't work,but, I have had fair luck with it.

If you are experiencing honest to goodness "blue stain" then the color is all you will suffer.  It doesn't seem to hurt the strength of the wood.  That's the stain that some of these enterprising young fellows are calling Denim Pine.  

[Fla._Deadheader]

  Look at this

http://www.forestryforum.com/cgi-bin/board/YaBB.pl?board=general&action=display&num=1081034096&start=

[Engineer]

Judging from the sites in the thread about 'denim pine', I'm guessing that what I have is just plain mildew.  I'm going to spray all the boards with bleach solution and hope for the best.

[MrMoo]

I had the same problem with some pine. It really showed up on some boards I milled in the rain.
A couple weeks later I tried spraying some bleach water solution on it but it made the boards turn bright yellow  .
I ended up letting em be and now they have a blue color to them but they are ok. If ya like blue that is. I'm going to use em as sheathing on my barn. Heck I can say its prepainted  
Yup semi-transparent blue stain  

[Don_Lewis]

Bleach will work but if you are a commercial operation, you might come under EPA or other agency rules controlling chemical use. But if you are considered a homeowner using the bleach for domestic use, no problem. I know that sounds nuts but 'thems the rules', as I understand them. That is why it is usually "officially" not recommended because no-one wants to recommend something that might turn into a violation. Anyway, don't take this as gospel either, but check on your own or be aware of the concerns.