There are questions for which we have no answer. All around us we have evidence of a miraculous universe, but we have no idea how it came to be or why we’re here. For some of us, assigning a divine intelligence to it explains it all. For some of us, it is just pushing the question down the road. Ultimately, it’s remarkable, but unknowable.
It’s all celestial pantry moths out there.
For at least two months I’ve had evidence of pantry moths. The evidence is in the form of a profusion of pantry moths flying around the house. I don’t know where they came from and I don’t know why they’re here. I know some things: they’re not here on vacation. They’re living here and raising the chilluns here. Somewhere. As is my habit, I allowed myself to consider that the first few moths were an anomaly. Maybe my neighbors on either side had an awesome pantry moth spread going and a few of them were just passing through my house as a shortcut.
Go ahead and call that wishful thinking, but don’t call it useless. I am admirably calm much of the time, and I owe a lot of that to a policy of willful ignorance.
Generally speaking, though, if you see one pantry moth, it’s not a loner. Just before they got to the point of blocking out the sun, I started hauling things out of the cupboard. The likely culprits were innocent: oatmeal, grains, nuts. The pecan container had a little linty business at the bottom which could be a moth thing. I threw them out in spite of the cost of pecans.
Of course I also Googled how big a deal pantry moths could be. After all, people all over the world consider this sort of thing legitimate protein. And sure enough, they’re not exactly bad for you. There isn’t anything really awful about eating them. Or the silk webbing they crud things up with. Or their [gad]
[blackout]
Chilluns. Eww.
See, your frontal brain can absorb the idea that you can eat your pantry-moth-infested goods to no ill effect, but when you actually see the little worms crawling around in your food, all full of mothly ambition, your Ickocampus kicks in. So. Back to getting rid of the moths. Which will of course not involve pesticides, speaking of problems. That would be like calling in a nuclear strike on your dandelions.
My technique, once I give in to bleak reality, is to remove everything from my cupboards, inspect it all, clean the bejesus out of the shelves, and put things back one by one, after careful inspection. It was a mystery. Then I found a small infested container with what it said was dried shiitake mushrooms but might have been a severed ear. Yay! I don’t mind throwing that out at all! Whatever it is!
A week later, more pantry moths. I was stumped. And then one day I had to move something to get something in the back. It was an overlooked sealed Ziploc bag with another plastic grocery bag inside it, twist-tied shut. And I still don’t know what was inside that bag, but the last time I saw that many worms it was on the back end of a miserable sheep. It was the dang Big Bang all over again.
I always clean my plastic bags and reuse them.
I used to always clean my plastic bags and reuse them.
Is it a seasonal thing here? I had to live in Colorado once, for work. I rented a house in Longmont, not too far from Boulder, and after living in Montana for years, it was a real comedown. Anyway, every summer there would be 3 weeks or so where the moths were everywhere, lots of them. In the house, 40 or more of them. Large ones. One day, driving to work I discovered they had somehow infiltrated the car, and were buzzing about me. At a stop light I rolled the windows down and tried to shoo them out, but they resisted. Finally, swatting at them while cars behind me honked to get me going, they flew out. I then saw why they were reluctant to leave…birds swooped down and were snatching them out of the air. After a couple weeks, they disappeared again for a year.
Not pantry moths. Those are the dreaded Colorado airbag moths.
We refer to that time of year as “Miller time”; they are Miller moths and great food for the birds. They aren’t an infestation as they’re just migrating. Some years are bad, some years we don’t see any.
I swear by these: https://www.terro.com/terro-pantry-moth-traps. Also, freezing bulk grains for a few days after bringing them home also helps.
I like your second suggestion. The first one? Sounds great if you want a moth collection. I want the chilluns out. The best way has to be to find their yummy stash.
Moth traps really work. I had a flour moth infestation. After dark it was as if the house was filled with snowflakes. Got the moth traps and it took some time, but they were finally gone.
I put bay leaves in everything. I don’t know where they go but I don’t have any moths…
So did my mom. Twigs of rosemary were another favorite, especially in her stash of wool strips (she braided rugs).
Aha! I have rosemary up the wazoo. No moths in there, either.
I should hope not.
As Paul is a bartender, and he hates wastefulness, he brings home the glass, air-tight jars that their brandied cherries come in when they are empty. I put EVERYTHING in these jars: nuts, dried beans, grains, flour, etc…. I even have enough to pass on to friends. I haven’t had a moth problem since I’ve been doing that. Before, I would just throw out whatever was infested. But it seems not to get infested this way.
Used to have a problem with fruit flies, but now i leave a small-necked vase half-filled with apple cider vinegar and topped with a tightly fitted plastic wrap with a slit in it in the middle of our fruit bowl. They go in for the fruity scent, but they don’t know how to come out again and they drown.
Okay: one more. For roaches or “waterbugs”, which are a kind of roach, no matter what you call them. I mix up boric acid powder with confectioners sugar, roughly half and half. Put it in a tiny lid (like from a contact lens case or a lid from Parmesan cheese or something shallow like that.) I put these under low-lying furniture that our parrots can’t get to (like the kitchen sideboard, the livingroom sofa, the computer room desk, etc.) I sometimes find their desiccated corpses, but don’t find any living ones.
Okay, one more! Mice. We had an infestation a couple years ago, and tried everything to get rid of them. They got used to the Hav-a-Hart traps and ignored them. I couldn’t use spring-loaded traps, because my arthritis basically made them a trebuchet that flung food behind heavy appliances. I even (sorry, those tender of heart!) used glue traps and immediately drowned the victims in plastic bags when found. Still they kept coming. What worked? Paul suggested these ultrasonic devices that you plug in and mice hear a sound that sounds like screeching to them, but neither you nor your pets can hear it. I thought it was snake oil, but they worked! We have them all over the house, the attic, and the garage. We still have an occasional mouse get in, as we have a very old house, and it would cost a fortune to fill every crack and hole to exclude mice. But it usually very quickly leaves. I still have Hav-a-Hart traps around the parrot cages to catch the few that come in from time to time.
I wonder though if long-term the devices that you can’t hear make you insane in some way that you will inevitably blame on something else? Gee. My own tinnitus ought to keep mice away.
Oh, Sweetie! I’ve always been insane. I can’t blame it on some device. And anyway, it’s better than having mice, as they can bring in fleas… and I have no idea how to get rid of THEM.
You catch more (fruit) flies with vinegar than, uh, than with something else. How does that go again?
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
“…your Ickocampus kicks in.”
Gold.
I had a teacher provide a wonderful image for remembering the function of the hippocampus: there’s a bewildered hippo wandering the local college campus, asking everyone she meets (it’s always a she in my imagination), “Where am I?” and immediately forgetting the answer.
Hanging onto Mimi’s long response–lots of good info in there!
I do like the fruit fly one.
My dad always laughed when we took the mice outside. “They’ll get back to the door faster than you can!” And he was usually right. But the look on my daughter’s face when she saw the spring traps made me feel like hitler.
We used to be owned by a miniature dachshund. He knew the sound of a mouse trap (unbaited or full) and it thrilled him to no end. They’re a hunting breed, after all. I didn’t realize how excited it would make him until one day while packing for a move I put some empty traps into a large box sitting on a dining room chair. He launched himself from the floor into that box, clearing the top edge easily.
BTW, peanut butter. Cheese is useless as it dries out too quickly. I think it only works in cartoons.
I mash a raisin into the bait pan and coat it with peanut butter. The raisin doesn’t come out unless they chew it and that trips the trap.
A friend recommended tying a piece of bacon to the pan. He swore by it, but I’ve never tried it. I do know from mice stealing skeletal bits I was examining that they really do like some nice dried flesh.
Thank you! After mice kept licking the peanut butter off the trap, the raisin peanut butter combo did the trick.
Yes! I use plain peanut butter in my Hav-a-Hart traps!
Last time we had mice, I tried peanut butter in a live trap, but had no success. The mice got into (one of) my stash of Dove Chocolate Promises, so I stuck a half-chewed Promise onto the peanut butter and eventually caught all five. Or maybe it was the same one five times, not sure.
Mary, I believe your daughter’s look must be indulged and celebrated. So good on you. And I just realized we had NO mice last winter. I have no explanation for that. I don’t think Tater can put the fear of Tater in anything.
My daughter had a pantry moth infestation thta went right through the house. I bought those sticky pheromone traps to catch the males so any new females that hatched couldn’t get fertilised and went through the house room by room, clearing cupboards, clothes, bookshelves, books and dvd cases of cocoons and showed her how to check for moth evidence in sealed plastic bags of things like flour and breadcrumbs etc, you tip the bag upside down and check the corners for webbing, then side ways and all other ways and if you see webbing you don’t buy that product, but take it to the front desk and make sure the store knows about it. Usually the moths or grubs are in something when you buy it and they’ll spin their cocoons in there, then once you open the package the hatched moths escape into your home. It took three years to fully clear my daughter’s house.
Huh! I figured they could come in from the bulk bins but new-bought sealed bags? Gadzooks.
I’ll never forget the awful sight of little worms squiggling in hot water when I was making brown rice. Stood at the stove staring into the broth and wondering if I was seeing movement or if the brown rice grains were just being carried around by boiling water currents. I think I recall seeing tiny eyes. Didn’t eat rice again for quite some time.
Well thanks, now I won’t either.
We had carpenter ants a few years ago that came up by the swarm around the base of our toilet. Conscientiously hired a “green” pest company which did absolutely nothing. Finally gave up and called a traditional “kill them with poison that will get into the water supply”. Ants haven’t been seen since, and neither have the pest control companies.
Had carpenter ants once. Called in a pest control guy I knew from my job in property management. He sprayed some kind of dust around in the crawl space. Killed EVERYTHING. Found dead mice lined up on the steps down.
Whatever it was, it wasn’t long lasting. The ants never came back or the mice in any numbers. But plenty of brown recluse spiders and camel/cave crickets. I give the latter a pass because they don’t disturb my stuff and are soundless. The worst they do is use your leg as a jumping off spot.
Murr, I keep nuts and raisins in the freezer. I read your line about throwing out pecans. I’ve had issues with those before. Solution was washing, drying in the oven and freezing. No need to toss.
Shucks!