These things appeared in friends flat. What are they?

  • Fosheze@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Grain moth larva. Good luck. The damn things are a pain to get rid of once you have them. You’ll want to pitch any food that isn’t 100% air tight sealed (bags or boxes of cereal, rice, flour, sugar, noodles, etc.) and then clean out any cabinets really well to make sure you get rid of as many eggs as possible. After that make sure you don’t leave any food unsealed for the next few months because odds are they will keep popping back up ocasionally for a bit and if they can get into anything when they do then the infestation starts all over. As far as infestations go they aren’t the worst to deal with but they are anoying.

    • blackbrook@mander.xyz
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      2 months ago

      Not just sealed. They will get into sealed cardboard boxes and through thin plastic. Like bags, forget it. Everything either needs to go into glass, metal, the fridge, or thick plastic, like tupperware. Also they will eat stuff you’d never expect, like spices, even hot pepper.

      • Hugin@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        Yup. I had an infestation thar took months to get rid of. Turns out they were in an old bag of dried peppers.

        • blackbrook@mander.xyz
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          2 months ago

          I’m not giving anyone orders, just trying to convey how ridiculously anal you have to be about it get rid of them. I went through several rounds of “surely these things will be ok, they aren’t open / in a ziplock / not something it would possibly want to eat” repeatedly failing to get rid of them before finally putting EVERYTHING into glass, Tupperware or the fridge.

          A flamethrower might work too.

    • gearheart@lemm.ee
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      2 months ago

      I hear they are very nutricious 🤔… Everything is so expensive now. So… Endless food source? Shittylpt?

    • FooBarrington@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      I just dealt with them a couple of months ago, absolute fucking nightmare. What solved it in the end was parasitic wasps - you can order them online. I received 3 letters in the mail a couple of weeks apart, each containing a small paper card with parasitic wasp eggs, which you put close to the source of larvae. The wasps lay their eggs inside the larvae eggs, but you’ll need to use all three letters to get all larvae throughout their cycle.

      Sounds weird as fuck, but immediately solved the problem.

      • JadenSmith@sh.itjust.works
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        2 months ago

        … How did you get rid of the wasps? Or is it a ‘they live here now, Bob’s the king of section 3-b’ sort of thing?

        • FooBarrington@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          Getting rid of the wasps was easy, the frogs took care of them. The annoying part was getting rid of the snakes…

          Nah, the wasps are tiny, I could barely see specks of dust moving around. They just died off after the larvae were gone.

      • Fosheze@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        Gonna be honest chief, I would sooner burn my house down than live with wasps.

        But thinking about it, I’m willing to bet that house centipedes would clear them up too. Those voracious little buggers eat everything.

          • Fosheze@lemmy.world
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            2 months ago

            Oh, cool! When you said parasitic wasp my brain immediately pictured a tarantula hawk wasp.

            • FooBarrington@lemmy.world
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              2 months ago

              Anything fruitfly and above would have meant I’ll just move, but yours sounds so much more horrifying. Oh god.

            • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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              2 months ago

              The parasitic (well, parasitoid since they live free as adults) ones are very different, sometimes literally microscopic, and never harmful to humans AFAIK.

              Gruesomely fascinating and widely studied, though. Relevant recent XKCD.

    • QuizzaciousOtter@lemm.ee
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      2 months ago

      I just fought them off in my apartment. Everything they said is correct. I just want to add that I bought some kind of spray to kill them and it was very effective. Got rid of them in two applications.

      • BruceTwarzen@lemm.ee
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        2 months ago

        I sealed all my stuff airtight and still, every day 2 to 5 popped up every day and i vacuumed them in. I have some mugs that my niece and nephew painted and i keep them on my cabinet so they don’t break. Turned out in one of them were christmas cookies that they made 2 years ago 😭