For cases like these, it would be nice to have chickens. You could feed them all the infected grains plus nutritious larvae. And buy new stuff for yourself and have fresh eggs.
the wiggling larvae are entertainment during dinner.
I’ve dealt with lots of infestations, and I don’t think you really need to go quite as far as stripping down to the studs. Really, I think just three steps:
- Put every dry grain and bean in the house either in the freezer or in the garbage. Keep them in the freezer for a week. After that, you can move them to good containers if you want.
- Clean out cabinets – just regular wet-sponge level of cleaning. You just want to get rid of debris, not sterilize to surgical levels (moths aren’t microscopic. A wet sponge will remove them).
and most importantly, since you won’t necessarily find every single moth in the house right now, - Get decent containers; airtight and solid. They will chew right through plastic bags or even very thin plastic-walled containers, and can crawl through loose rubber seals.
For a few months, make sure that if you have a bag or loose container of grain or beans, that it stays in the freezer. If you’ve gone 3-6 months without a sighting, you can relax a little bit, but can’t hurt to store in good containers anyway.
Throw these grains out and get new ones!
You can also buy pantry moth traps. Obviously, they only catch the adults, but it’s good to have in addition to your Scorched Earth cleanout.
I met some folks who did long voyages on their sailboat and used the technique of packing grains etc. in airtight containers (I believed they mostly used ziplock bags) and injecting CO[sub]2[/sub] just before sealing. The CO[sub]2[/sub] displaces most of the air, leaving an atmosphere in which nothing can live. They claimed this worked like a charm.
They used a small CO[sub]2[/sub] bottle (I think it was one designed to fill paintball guns) fitted with a nozzle to give short squirts. Apparently this was sufficient to do a great many injections.
What if the new ones also have bugs in them? :rolleyes:
Absolutely agree with the Scorched Earth tactic noted above. I had to do it at my dad’s house, it’s horrible having to throw out a couple of trash bags full of seemingly ok foods…but if you’re sentimental about one little thing, they’ll be back.
Totally anecdotal, no cite, and I don’t recall where I got this piece of info, but I did hear somewhere that the moths/larvae don’t like bay leaves, so I got a brand new bottle of bay leaves and scattered them all on the newly cleaned pantry shelves. Could be we got rid of all the larvae and the bay leaves have no effect, but for all I know, they helped. In any case, they’re not harming anything and the bugs have stayed gone.
Dammit! A week 
We had a similar problem with pantry bugs all over our apartment. We eventually traced them back to flour and other grains in the pantry (until then, they were just “bugs”).
We basically threw away all our grains. Any new grains, keep in the freezer for like 5 days.
Honest to God, that was par for the course when we lived on Pohnpei in Micronesia. The old-time foreigners used to say that newcomers went through three stages:
Brand new: “Eww! There are bugs in my rice! I can’t eat this.”
Somewhat used to tropical island life: “Eww! There are bugs in my rice! I must pick them out before I finish eating it!”
Acculturated: “Oh, bugs in the rice. No biggie, they won’t hurt me.”
Funny, living in India we definitely followed the third option when it came to the rice weevils. Figured they were small enough not to worry about. But the pantry moths are too big to ignore (at least for now)
yeah, a week seems like an awfully long time to me too.
Can anyone explain why it takes so long to kill a larva or moth by freezing? I mean, if I was exposed to sub-freezing temperatures without any protection I would be dead in a couple of hours, and frozen solid after a couple more. With the pantry moth the water in its cells would presumably freeze pretty quickly. Are you saying that if you brought the moth back to room temp after say one day it would spring back to life?
And if it is going into some sort of cryogenic stasis, what is different between one day and one week?
Paging the entomologist.
Well, most of us cook our rice and other grains before eating, right? So they bugs won’t be full of live germs. If they’re few enough in number (that they haven’t substantially ruined the product), why not just chow them down?
The Wikipedia page on the closely-related Mediterranean Flour Moth says:
Italics mine.
I see a potential symbiotic relationship I can totally get down with!
I store my unopened grain packages in the freezer, and in the refrigerator after they’re opened. You don’t get ants in your sugar if you do it this way, either.
p.s. I’ve heard some theories about how strict vegans in the Third World get their B-12, and some of them are quite unpleasant, but honestly, this is where it comes from; their grains and other foods are “buggy” enough to provide them with an adequate supply of vitamin B-12.
Cuz they’re gross. Take a popular survey and see how many people are willing to eat insects; it won’t be a majority.
Some kind of pantry moths, I expect.
We had a mercifully brief bout of them; almost certainly due to an infested bag of whole wheat flour, at least they appeared right after we got a bag of it. I finally opened the bag and there was evidence of webbing near the top.
Those buggers can find the weirdest places to lay eggs and reproduce, including getting inside things wrapped in plastic, behind can labels, behind gaps in wallpaper, etc. etc. etc.
We were very fortunate, however. We threw out practically every dry good we had in the cupboard unless it was in a sealed package; froze some of what we kept, and everything else went into tightly-closing Tupperware (google Modular Mates; also look for a thread on tupperware in the Marketplace forum for a Doper who’s a Tupperware dealer). And this appears to have been enough; it’s been 18 months or so and we’ve never seen them again.
The one proof we had of them attempting to spread was an old partial bag of rice that was clipped shut with a plastic bag clip: I found a dead moth inside the bit of plastic outside the clip.
Do freeze every new that comes in. Throw away everything you have now, or freeze it for a few days to kill any inhabitants. If you don’t see visible critters you might miss the eggs but hell, they won’t harm you if you cook the grains and accidentally ingest a bit more protein! Scrub down all the pantry shelves. Replace shelf paper if you have it.
And seal everything in tight-sealing containers. Supposedly the critters can get inside plastic containers but mine DO seal pretty tightly and it hasn’t been an issue.