What are wheat awls and effective remedies to keep calender and other insects away from our pantries.
They are small, very small, and dark brown in color. If you build a crack in a pack of pasta, it's over. They are the ones that in the jargon define themselves "wheat awls" or "some pasta"Or, more general,"cereals" or again Calandra. It is the Sitophilus granarius, a small insect that could live in our pantries, attacking, precisely, grains of cereals and derivatives. But how to eliminate the wheat weevil?
In fact, there are not only wheat weevils, but another one as well thousands of insects and parasites who love so much our furniture in the kitchen or the closet where we usually keep food supplies. From butterflies to flour moths, they are capable of devouring any small thing like lions. (READ also: How to Preserve Our Pantry From Bees and Pests (Meal Moths)
How to recognize wheat awls
Il grain awl is a small insect of the Curculionide family, small at most 5 millimeters. It is brown, has a long rostrum, reddish, angled antennae and reddish-brown legs. It cannot fly but it does a lot of damage mostly on the kernels of various cereals in stock (especially wheat, barley, corn and pasta). And it is mainly the larvae that cause them.
How does Sitophilus granarius get into the bag of our pasta? Well, know that as long as the products in the pantry are not hermetically sealed in the glass, you will never be safe. And so, the grain awl manages to pierce plastic, paper and fabric packaging. Only foods closed in glass (hermetically sealed) are significantly less exposed. (READ also: Food preservation: 5 alternatives to transparent PVC film)
The female of the wheat weevil digs a hole in the kernels, laying one egg for each seed. Oviposition can last for a few months, during which more than 200 eggs are laid. After about one to two weeks from the laying of the eggs, an apoda larva emerges which lives feeding on the starch of the caryopsis until reaching one month.
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At maturity, the wheat weevil "escapes" to mate and look for a new territory and new food.
Wheat weevil prevention and elimination
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If in warehouses you use a food traps, to light traps with electric discharge, to the capture of males or to new more sophisticated systems of conservation, at home in our small way?
Start by literally inspecting everything in the pantry or furniture where you have food. Clean inside using a vacuum cleaner and then cleaning with hot water and white vinegar, and then dry. You could also add a few drops of mint, lemongrass or eucalyptus essential oil to the water. If, while cleaning, some animal shows up and you have used the vacuum cleaner, of course, change the bag and do not leave it in the garbage.
Check all the products before buying them, then, once at home, you could put them in a plastic bag and keep them in the freezer for a week to kill any eggs. In any case, consume everything that is subject to be devoured by these types of insects in a short time and buy little by little.
The best method of preserving food is glass, no fabric bags and even less plastic. A last, natural, trick could be to place natural repellents such as cloves or bay leaves that are repellent for insects, or bags of black pepper.
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