Dennis,

We've survived at least one such major invasion. Nice to know the latin
name of the little buggers!

Gene.

PS: a few years ago

On Fri, 3 May 1996, Dennis Paulson wrote:

> 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
>
>
>