Invest in a boatload of those plastic vacuum sealed storage containers to put cereal, pasta, flour, sugar, pasta, nuts, etc. You can either throw most of your non-canned goods away (as the buggers can get into anything) or, if you have a big enough freezer, you can put everything in the freezer for a few days as the larvae cannot survive being frozen.
I also had very good success with the Pantry Pest sticky traps. They sell them in hardward stores. They have moth pheromones that trap the males onto their sticky surface. It’s kind of gross to open up your pantry and see wriggling moths, but a lot more palatable than seeing moths and those horrible larvae climbing everywhere.
if you freeze any food it will kill adults and larvae. eggs will survive and hatch after two weeks back at room temperature. you can refreeze again to kill larvae after two weeks but before adults can form and lay new eggs. enough freeze and room temperature cycles and you might kill off the population.
Oh boy, I’m crossing my fingers that I’ve finally eradicated those beasts from my pantry. I tried the sticky card style trap but it didn’t get rid of the problem.
Here’s what I did that seems to have worked:
I emptied my pantry, searched everything and threw away infested items. Then, thoroughly cleaned inside and out with diluted bleach water and filled any crevices in the shelves with silicone caulking. I also sprayed Ortho Home Defense inside the cabinet, along all the shelves and joints and let it air out for a day before putting anything back in the cabinet. I’m not sure if Home Defense is supposed to kill moths but I use it around the rest of the house so it couldn’t hurt to keep other bugs out of my cabinets.
Excluding cans and jars, I put nearly everything in air-tight bowls and bins. When I buy cereal, I empty it immediately into Snap-ware cereal containers (keeps it fresher anyway) and all individually wrapped snacks (granola bars, etc.) are taken out of the cardboard boxes and placed are in one big air-tight snap-ware bin.
Half of my freezer is occupied with ziplock bags of pasta, rice, oatmeal, popcorn, and other dry goods that I didn’t have enough containers for.
It seems like it has worked. I’ve only seen 3 or 4 moths this Spring. I don’t think they have any food available to survive.
Place bay leaves in your pantry/cabinets and also in open containers of meal/flour/etc. Growing up, we used to get annual infestations of mealworms until mom started doing this. After that, none.
Wow, you have some really old flour/oatmeal in your pantry. Reminds me of grade school science class. We all had meal worms that we raised in oatmeal. One day they were all little moths flying about. Metamorphosis!
If you don’t want this to happen again keep your flour in a zip lock bag in your freezer. The zip lock bag will keep the flour from picking up odors and moisture and the frigid temperature will keep any eggs in the flour from hatching. Someone told me to freeze all flour for three days after bringing it home.
I keep my baking stuff in large zip lock bags. Hope this helps.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a pantry moth, but now I’m worried! I’ve got unprotected bags of flour, cardboard containers of oatmeal, and granola bars and pasta in my pantry. And I’m at work now and can’t do anything about it! Am I doomed?
I think they must be what we were told were called nut-moths. Everything in our pantry is now either in a sealed plastic or glass container. We no longer have any.
