WEEVILS

Maybe you were going to cook up some rice for dinner tonight. Maybe you were planning to make a cake for a loved one’s birthday. You reached into your pantry to grab out your bag of flour or rice. You dump it into your bowl to get it ready for use. Your stomach rolls as you look down to see tiny bugs crawling through it. Your grains have just been infested by weevils.

Weevils are small insects that live and feed off of grain seeds. Although harmless to humans, they can absolutely ruin foodstuffs in your pantry. No one wants to eat food that has bugs crawling through it. So how did they get there?

Weevils live their whole lives in grains. Their eggs grow into larvae inside of the grain and feed on them for their whole lives before emerging to reproduce and lay more eggs. This makes them a nightmare for food storage. There is almost no sign a weevil has infected stored grains until the weevil reaches maturity. This means that food that appeared perfectly fine when you put it away can be irretrievably infested by the time you learn the truth.

The good news is weevils, although gross, are harmless. They can be removed by simply throwing out the infected foodstuff and vacuuming and remaining weevils. Pesticides, aside from being harmful to food storage areas, are wholly unnecessary. This is also true if you are noticing house weevils, another form of insect which can occasionally find its way into your home. Unlike most other pest, a weevil infestation bears little risk of reinfestation after the contaminated area has been cleaned.
A weevil infestation can ruin your meal. But the good news is, they will not ruin your home. Your first instinct after finding weevils is correct: throw the infested food out and clean out the area. This should help keep this occurrence a rare, if frustrating, one.