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A food safety expert weighs in on flour bugs, also known as weevils, that can infest your pantry after one TikToker found her flour infested with the crawlers.
The drugstore beetle attacks a wide variety of food sources including pharmaceutical products and medicinal plants, earning its name. This species is known for feeding on both food and non-food materials. The beetle eats bread, grain, coffee beans, powdered milk, sweets like cookies and chocolates, spices and herbs, dried fruit, seeds, and more.
The pupation period takes a total of 12–18 days. The entire life cycle of the drugstore beetle lasts approximately two months but can be as long as seven months. These stored product pests will infest almost anything readily available. Food products prone to infestation include flour, dry mixes, breads, cookies, and other spices.
The confused flour beetle is very similar in appearance and habit to the red flour beetle, Tribolium castaneum and the destructive flour beetle, Tribolium destructor.Both the confused flour beetle and red flour beetle are small, about 3–6 mm (1/ 8 + 1 ⁄ 4-inch) in length, and reddish-brown in color.
The weevils are hard to detect and usually all of the grain in an infested storage facility must be destroyed. Many methods have been attempted to get rid of the wheat weevil, such as pesticides, different methods of masking the odor of the grain with unpleasant scents, and some have even gone as far as introducing predator organisms.
Control of weevils involves locating and removing all potentially infested food sources. Rice weevils in all stages of development can be killed by freezing infested food below −18 °C (0 °F) for a period of three days, or heating to 60 °C (140 °F) for a period of 15 minutes. [9]
Peanut Butter. This one may cause a pause, but there's a caveat here. Most commercial peanut butter lasts a while in the pantry if they're unopened like six to 24 months. On the other hand ...
The maize weevil (Sitophilus zeamais), known in the United States as the greater rice weevil, [1] [2] is a species of beetle in the family Curculionidae. It can be found in numerous tropical areas around the world, and in the United States, and is a major pest of maize . [ 3 ]