These things appeared in friends flat. What are they?

  • Fosheze@lemmy.world
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    23 days 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.

    • FooBarrington@lemmy.world
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      22 days 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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        22 days 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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          22 days 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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        22 days 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.