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You'll know you have weevils if you spot tiny brown bugs in your dry goods or around the food containers. Weevils are especially easy to spot in light-colored foods like rice and light-colored grains. Other signs you may have weevils are “damaged packages or fine dust inside or outside of food containers,” Wang says.
Weevils are not harmful to humans, pets, houses, furniture, or clothing and don't carry any diseases. They are temporary nuisance pests that damage stored food products. If weevils infest a garden or field, they can damage plants and reduce crop yields.
Flour weevils are 0.12 to 0.16 inches (3 – 4 mm) long black-red or metallic reddish-brown bugs with six legs and a characteristic snout or beak on their mouth. They typically attack all flour types, including corn and wheat. You can expect them to enter your pantry in two ways, by flying or on the packaging.
Like other pantry pests, weevils will infest and feed on grains, nuts, beans, cereals, seeds, corn, and other foods. But unlike beetles that live and feed on foods, weevils live and feed inside the food item.
But what happens if you eat flour mites or weevils – are they harmful? If you eat flour with weevils they are unlikely to harm you, so don't be too concerned if you've used the contaminated product beforehand. If you're using products in baking, the high temperatures would help to have made the flour safe to eat.
Cloves and bay leaves act as natural repellents to weevils. Place a few bay leaves in your dried food containers to ward off these pests, and position several cloves of garlic around your pantry and kitchen to deter these bugs from making a home in your pantry. White vinegar is also known to kill pesky pantry weevils.
Storing flour in airtight plasticware or a glass mason jar will keep it fresh for up to 10 months and keep pests like flour bugs at bay. If you have the tools to vacuum seal your flour, it can last for up to two years.
Weevils are the largest family of beetles. There are over 6,000 described species in Australia. Adult vegetable weevils (sometimes called the brown vegetable weevil) are 8 mm long, greyish-brown in colour and have a noticeable and inconspicuous V-shape marking (grey brown) on the wing covers near the rear of the body.
Weevils prefer warm, moist environments. Some species live among plants and lay their eggs in rolled-up leaves, while others feed and breed within stored food products like cereal grains. Weevils usually invade homes seeking food or shelter.
The most common pantry pests are moths, weevils and small beetles. Annoying and waste good food but not dangerous and easy to eliminate if you follow a few simple tips. Pantry Pests can be maggot-like caterpillars, moths or beetles.
To kill weevils for real, treat them with Ortho® Insect, Mite & Disease 3-in-1 or Ortho® BugClear™ Insect Killer for Lawns & Landscapes. Be sure to always follow the label directions.
As previously stated, 61 days' refrigeration killed all emerged weevils, although some survived within the beans.
Adult weevils can also be captured using a pitfall trap constructed from a several-inches-deep, wide-mouthed plastic cup or dish and a funnel or smaller tapered cup. Cut off most of the funnel's spout or the bottom of the smaller cup and insert it snugly into the larger cup with the hole pointed down.
But for homeowners with pest problems, a pest exterminator in Huntersville also recommends white vinegar as a solution for weevils. Yes! Vinegar can help in getting rid of weevils and other pests that's why you can use it for your problem.
About rice and granary weevils
The adults can fly and are attracted to light. The larvae (immature weevils) are legless and creamy-white with a brownish-black head. They attack corn, wheat, rice, beans, nuts, cereals, rye, buckwheat, stored cotton, wheat products, and grapes.
Properly ventilate the storage area to discourage these moisture-loving stored product pests. Be sure to store only clean, dry grain with a moisture content of 12 percent or less to reduce weevil problems. Grain insects are declared under the Agriculture and Related Resources Protection Act.
Baking kills eggs and hatched weevils before they ever make it to your mouth, so the chances you've been eating live flour bugs are pretty slim.
You can also try placing a few garlic cloves or bay leaves inside the bag of flour to ward off weevils (assuming you don't mind some potential garlic flavor in your food). This is an easy way to deter the creatures without storing your flour in the freezer all of the time.
Black-point-infected plants produce chemicals in the bran and the germ area, resulting in brown-to-black specks in flour, poor bran colour and rejection.
A natural method of deterring weevils is the placement of dried chilies, cloves or bay leaves on pantry shelves. Weevils are sensitive to smell and dislike the aroma of spices; the presence of these strong-smelling herbs will repel rice weevils and other household pests.
Psocids (or flour weevils) are tiny brown or black insects which live in dry foods, including flour and sugar. Packets of food that have been opened should be used up quickly and not pushed out of sight to the back of the cupboard.
You can also tell the two apart by looking at their legs. “Weevils have six legs, whereas the nymph and adult stage of ticks that people might find walking or attached to them have eight legs,” Albrecht Koppenhöfer, MS, PhD, an entomologist at Rutgers University, tells SELF.