This is an alert to watch out for flour moths (family Ephestiidae), the
larvae of which infest bird seed. Four or five months ago, we acquired
these pests in bags of commercial bird seed. The infestation was in full
bloom before I had any idea which seeds had them first, and we had bought
them at several places. The bad thing is that they will infest almost any
dried food in your kitchen, including nuts, cereals, crackers, flour, dried
fruit--you name it. If you see little light gray moths, about a centimeter
long, sitting on your walls or ceiling or fluttering through a room, you
probably have them.

The only way to get rid of them is to find *every* possible source of
larval food and throw it out--box, bag, and barrel. In coarse products,
it's hard to see the small caterpillars, and you can miss them when you
look through a box of cereal, for example; same is true in bird seed. The
adult moths are the clue. We discarded all of our dried food that wasn't
in mothproof containers (several items were indeed infested) and put all of
our bird seed outside in a garbage can. The larvae lived through several
freezing spells, so we're not putting any new seed in with the old until
all the moths are gone. We killed several hundred moths in the house over
a period of a couple of months (we sent out a hunter/killer team every
night), but none has appeared in the last couple of weeks.

Friends of ours had the same thing happen several months earlier, with
seeds bought at a different place. Just as in the comics, the husband ate
a whole bunch of infested fig newtons that the wife had put out on the
counter to throw away!

I'd be curious to know if anyone else has found these moths (please post me
directly).

Dennis Paulson, Director phone 206-756-3798
Slater Museum of Natural History fax 206-756-3352
University of Puget Sound e-mail dpaulson at ups.edu
Tacoma, WA 98416