For about the last, oh, six weeks or so I’ve had an infestation of moths in my home. Little brown ones with wings that fold up against their bodies rather than lie flat out. I originally found them inside a kitchen cabinet that had grain products in it (mostly pasta and rice) so I threw away everything not in a can or jar in all my cabinets and figured that’d handle the problem. And, sure enough, I haven’t seen any more in the cabinets but they’re still in my home. I thought maybe they were eating my clothing or something but I haven’t seen any in my drawers or closet nor noticed any fabric damage to anything in my home. For that matter, from what little I know about moths, the larvae would be eating the stuff and the moths themselves would need to find some substitute for nectar in my home.
So what are these little bastards up to? I would have thought that even if the eggs were hatching, the adults wouldn’t be able to find food and might die without breeding but they’re obviously eating something. For the last week or two, I’ve just restorted to killing them as I find them flying about – maybe one or two a night – and I think the number is going down but it’s hard to tell. Am I just seeing the last of the larvae maturing into adults or is there a secret moth breeding ground someplace? I live in the suburbs of Chicago, by the way.
What you’ve got there are grain moths, and they can indeed be persistent. They aren’t eating your clothes, but they could be infesting any source of dry food, such as spilled food or crumbs in cracks and crevices, pet food, bird seed, boxed cake mix, even dried flower arrangements.
Keep killing the ones you find and clean the bejeebus out of all the locations where you find them. That will eventually take care of the problem, but it may take a while.
The place where I buy parrot food has small pheromone traps with sticky to lure and trap the critters. A pack of two was only a few bucks and did the job nicely. Look for flour moth traps, either in a pet store on online.
Meal moths are nasty underhanded critters. The pheromone traps work well, but you also have to clean out all your old grain products, because they’re likely to be lurking (or laying) there. We put all of our grain and dried bean products (including breakfast cereals) in plastic airtight containers, or in some cases (like with flour) into the freezer. You should know, however, that you may also be importing new ones in from your local supermarket, so just when you think you’ve cleared them all out, you get new ones.
I live in the tropics so this may not apply to all.
NUKE the bastards from orbit it’s the only way to be sure.
Seriously though, remove all items from the cabinette, wash entire cabinette with bleach water. Spray raid then wash again.
Examine all grain products carefully, see anything wiggling in there? Throw it. Nothing wiggling? Remove from silly cardboard/cellophane packaging and place into ?airtight? packaging and microwave it for a minute or so (till you can feel heat)
That aught to hold ya for a month or two.
Note, I microwave things like cornmeal and pasta as a matter of habit when I get home from the store.
But how come they have just shown up in the past year. When we had an infestation of them, we cleaned out the pantry that had all the grain a bean products. I found a sealed package of beans that was full of them, so it clearly came from the packager. Now all our beans are in glass jars and everything we buy in these plastic packages spends a couple weeks in the freezer. We still have a few, but it basically seems to have worked. Oddly enough the one thing they didn’t seem to be able to get to were the Tupperware containers of flour.
Maye I will look for the pheromone traps. But how come I never saw them before? The larvae, incidentally, are small white worms, maybe a half inch long and 1/16th wide. Very easy to dispatch if you see them. The moths themselves are much easier then flies to catch.
I had the same problem. Little tiny brown moths kept showing up.
I found a whole bunch of them in my vaccuum cleaner canister. I must admit I hadn’t emptied it in a while and I just happened to be playing with the dog on the floor and I noticed there was a moth city in the canister. My husband emptied it in the trashbin outside and and we’ve seen only a few since that time. Check your vaccuum!