NATIONAL FORESTS -- Finally, some good news on the pine beetle infestation that's left much of the West with a glut of firewood.

Wyoming’s bark beetle epidemic is showing signs of slowing, forestry officials say, for the rather depressing reason that the insects are running out of trees in the state to infest.

But the beetles aren’t out of the woods yet, according to forest experts quoted in a Casper Tribune story.

And the larger question may be how to deal with the huge expanses of dead trees they’ve already left behind.

The latest aerial survey by the U.S. Forest Service, released in January, shows an estimated 314,000 acres of Wyoming pine forest died from beetle infestation in 2010 — mostly from mountain pine beetles. That’s a fourth of tree mortality rates in Wyoming during both 2009 and 2008.

In all, about 3.1 million acres of trees in Wyoming — mainly lodgepole and ponderosa pine — have been infested since the outbreak was first noticed about 15 years ago.

Similar reports come from Colorado and Montana.