Ips bark beetles are about the length of a grain of rice. By the time the top of a spruce goes red, the beetles have usually been inside it for weeks, so the call worth making is the one you make while the tree still looks fine.
Host
Colorado blue spruce · Austrian & Scotch pine
Symptom
Pitch tubes on the trunk, boring dust in the bark crevices, fading from the top down
Window
Preventative trunk spray through 30 Sep · infested wood out now
