Pantry moth pie?
I’ve had good experience with traps. Also, anything with cornmeal is likely to have eggs in it. That’s just how it goes. You can seal stuff in the most secure jar ever, but the moths! They’re INSIDE the jar!
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Oh god, this reminds me of a nightmare infestation we had once. I opened a new bag of cat food, reached in blindly and…WEBS! We sealed everything, cleaned everything, and it still took about 6 weeks to end the infestation. They were all through our cabinets and in everything. They chewed into ziplock bags, and we just threw a lot of things out rather than risk hanging on to something that was filled with eggs or larva. We just kept looking everywhere for the next source of 'em. Find it, toss it, scour the area, repeat.
Ugh… it was almost as awful as the white-footed ant infestation.
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I put a pheremone trap in just as an experiment -haven’t noticed any moths in my kitchen - but it relentlessly racks up kills, and I must not be seeing a fair amount of activity… Traps only catch the males, though. So if the mother moths can get it on outside the range of the trap, or if eggs come in from outside, only half their spawn is going to end up in the trap.
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Since the pandemic I’ve been baking all my bread and nixtamalizing corn for tortillas. I had issues with bugs in the corn and some bulk lentils I bought.
I used Foodgrade diatomaceous earth. It won’t kill the bugs in the food, but it will kill them once they emerge and stopping them from reinfecting.
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Yes, the restaurant sized glass, (or preferably) plastic sized jars used to hold bulk products, like pickles- I’ve used those for years. Lately I have added gallon zipper bags to enclose individual boxes. Yes, sometimes they come pre-infested from the store. Once some ants got into our dog food, which was in an open bag on the bottom of the pantry. Turns out a minute on high by the microwavable bowl-full does the trick. Empty into another bag and then transfer the heated, treated, and completed chow back to the original bag. What, no sorting? Well, OK, YOU can pick out the dead ants if your dog complains. Ours regularly try to eat or play with any bugs they find in the back yard.
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First go buy some Pantry Moth Traps. They’re little cardboard frames with a tiny patch of moth pheromone (not a pesticide) on a larger patch of glue. The male moths all get stuck on the glue before they can find the females, so there won’t be more generations. Always keep one in each cupboard. But you also need throw out everything that could be infested, and put all your new food in jars or airtight bags to protect it from any remaining eggs or larva.
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The obvious solution is to adapt a big, old-school, tape library for food storage purposes: the robotic manipulators can handle all the stowing and retrieval of food packages; and since you don’t have to go inside you can just flood the thing with nitrogen or argon.
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Our household goes through a big container of Costco nuts every couple of months. The screw-top plastic jars are great for holding flour, beans, cornmeal, cat food, and any other under 5 pound quantity of consumables. I recently decanted a 22 pound bag of cat kibble into a dozen of the jars; keeps it fresher, too.
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Freezer is the answer.
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I put my newly purchased flour, rice etc. directly into my chest freezer for two weeks. Since I started giving everything the freezer treatment no pantry moths.
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We have a gecko or three roaming around in the house. The tiny Florida ones. I leave them alone and we don’t have bug problems inside the house. Besides, pantry moths, corn weevils, etc. just add more protein to your meals.
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I had an infestation problem I couldn’t kick until I figured out that the little holes for the adjustable shelving in the kitchen cabinet was their favorite place to best. Covered all the holes with masking tape and fixed the issue. Why do kitchens come with so many places for bugs to hide?
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well, there’s definitely fire, so at least two ways
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tl;dr, is it this way?!
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When we had pantry moths we cleaned out the pantry, washed cans, sealed anything else in freezer zip-loc bags or tight lidded jars, vacuumed the entire pantry and used a pheromone trap. It took a while but it worked. But I’m also trained in integrated pest management and that’s how I roll.
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Been there, done that. Tight-fitting lids, absolutely. I concur.
The picture is of a common clothes moth, which will eat stuff in the pantry but isn’t the most common type you find there.
