These things appeared in friends flat. What are they?
this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2024
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Asklemmy
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Grain moth larva. Good luck. The damn things are a pain to get rid of once you have them. You'll want to pitch any food that isn't 100% air tight sealed (bags or boxes of cereal, rice, flour, sugar, noodles, etc.) and then clean out any cabinets really well to make sure you get rid of as many eggs as possible. After that make sure you don't leave any food unsealed for the next few months because odds are they will keep popping back up ocasionally for a bit and if they can get into anything when they do then the infestation starts all over. As far as infestations go they aren't the worst to deal with but they are anoying.
Not just sealed. They will get into sealed cardboard boxes and through thin plastic. Like bags, forget it. Everything either needs to go into glass, metal, the fridge, or thick plastic, like tupperware. Also they will eat stuff you'd never expect, like spices, even hot pepper.
Yup. I had an infestation thar took months to get rid of. Turns out they were in an old bag of dried peppers.
Interesting. I wonder if that's all moths - flies experience capsaicin the same way as we do.
Lol, Commander in Chief, giving instructions. Got it.
๐คก
I'm not giving anyone orders, just trying to convey how ridiculously anal you have to be about it get rid of them. I went through several rounds of "surely these things will be ok, they aren't open / in a ziplock / not something it would possibly want to eat" repeatedly failing to get rid of them before finally putting EVERYTHING into glass, Tupperware or the fridge.
A flamethrower might work too.
That'll do it
I hear they are very nutricious ๐ค... Everything is so expensive now. So.... Endless food source? Shittylpt?
Nono, you got a point.
That's just farming, only on a reeeeeeaaaaly small scale.
Or at a homestead scale.
https://youtu.be/IIbT4Sout74
Endless food source yes. For you? No.
https://youtu.be/IIbT4Sout74
Free chicken feed.
Well, you're actually guaranteed to get less food out than in. Insect farming is only a LPT if you have something we can't eat to feed them, or are a bodybuilder who needs more protein than you can feasibly get from plants.
I just dealt with them a couple of months ago, absolute fucking nightmare. What solved it in the end was parasitic wasps - you can order them online. I received 3 letters in the mail a couple of weeks apart, each containing a small paper card with parasitic wasp eggs, which you put close to the source of larvae. The wasps lay their eggs inside the larvae eggs, but you'll need to use all three letters to get all larvae throughout their cycle.
Sounds weird as fuck, but immediately solved the problem.
... How did you get rid of the wasps? Or is it a 'they live here now, Bob's the king of section 3-b' sort of thing?
Getting rid of the wasps was easy, the frogs took care of them. The annoying part was getting rid of the snakes...
Nah, the wasps are tiny, I could barely see specks of dust moving around. They just died off after the larvae were gone.
Gonna be honest chief, I would sooner burn my house down than live with wasps.
But thinking about it, I'm willing to bet that house centipedes would clear them up too. Those voracious little buggers eat everything.
Luckily they are tiny tiny wasps, like specks of dust. Anything bigger and I would have run!
Oh, cool! When you said parasitic wasp my brain immediately pictured a tarantula hawk wasp.
Anything fruitfly and above would have meant I'll just move, but yours sounds so much more horrifying. Oh god.
The parasitic ones (well, parasitoid since they live free as adults) are very different, sometimes literally microscopic, and never harmful to humans AFAIK.
Gruesomely fascinating and widely studied, though. Relevant recent XKCD.
Whay they ๐ said, have fun. They're a pain in the ass to get rid of.
I sealed all my stuff airtight and still, every day 2 to 5 popped up every day and i vacuumed them in. I have some mugs that my niece and nephew painted and i keep them on my cabinet so they don't break. Turned out in one of them were christmas cookies that they made 2 years ago ๐ญ
I just fought them off in my apartment. Everything they said is correct. I just want to add that I bought some kind of spray to kill them and it was very effective. Got rid of them in two applications.
Which is the worst to deal with, in your opinion?
Bed bugs. Easily.
Now that I think of it, duh!