Pantry Moths...

***Pantry Moths***

Who Knew

So I lived in Texas for the last eight years.  The bugs are VERY different than the Kansas bugs, wood roaches that are three inches long and scare the living h*ll out of you.  But I never in all my life heard of pantry moths.  So I saw a moth in my pantry and thought absolutely nothing of it.  A couple of days later I say several -six to ten.  I killed them and went about my day.  Less than a week later there were over twenty visual moths.  I did not have time to deal with them.  So I planned to get to the bottom of it the next day.  I embarked on the WORST infestation I have ever dealt with.

I have had weevils, so I keep everything in plastic.

Moths. This does not do the situation justice.  There were a good hundred.

I went and got OFF flying bug killer and sprayed the p* out of them.  That was JUST the first step in an all day cleaning embankment.

Here is the larvae that I had to scrape from the surface, they stick to the surface and are not able to be just vacuumed off.   I have five shelves they were along all the corners, top and underneath side.  There were hundreds of them.

So I threw away anything that was in a box that I was not sure of, crackers, cake mix, ect.  But that was not the "nest" which I didn't know at the time.  All the research stated that they are drawn to grain items.  Which is a problem in my pantry.  I store everything in PLASTIC.

I mean everything.

Pasta, rice, chocolate, all sugars, to beans and dog food.  We buy in bulk so I am all about plastic storage.  So I was at a loss.  I cleaned and got all the bugs.

But day two I got up to four moths and a handful of the damn worms.  I was furious and confused.  But in my cleaning I had put an open bag of puppy food in a plastic stack container.  You know the kind that are not air tight buy allow you to stack them.  Well the container was full of worms.  BINGO the nest.  I put the bag in a plastic bag,  that in the trash and rolled the trash can from the garage.  All day long I would find a random worm (larvae) or a moth.  But I was sure that I had the only food source.  So I stayed calm.  On day three I had even less random missed worms.  They are tiny and hard to miss.  They are on the bottoms of all the cans, in the creases of the plastic containers.  I mean EVERYWHERE.  But I would get them and stay calm.  Day four was even better just a couple of strays, nothing like day one.  Day five NOTHING...  You have no idea how happy I was.  SO the lesson here is that moths in the pantry are NOTHING to ignore.  And is takes a good week of gathering the strays to completely rid the pantry.

Happy bug killing.