Imagine this scenario. You head to the pantry for your flour so you can bake some cookies with your kids. Instead of flour, you find red flour beetles or indian meal moths. The pantry is the last place people want to see pests, but it’s not uncommon for pest control experts to get a call like that. How can you put an end to the problem? Take a look.

Common Pantry Pests

There are a number of different pantry pests you may have inside your home.

  • Cigarette beetles are 2 to 3 mm in length. They prefer rice, ginger, pepper, raisins, seeds, spices, and dates.
  • Drugstore beetles are about 2.5 mm long and like dry pet foods, flour, cereals, spices and pepper.
  • The confused flour beetle is about 4.5 to 5 mm long. They like to eat cereals, cornmeal, and flour.
  • The red flour beetle is also about 4.5 to 5mm in length and prefers eating the same, flour, cereals, and cornmeal.
  • The sawtoothed grain beetle is only about 2.5 mm long and they like to eat on pasta, cereals, flour, cornmeal, cracked seeds, seed dust and nuts.
  • The merchant grain beetle, which is also only about 2.5mm long prefers the same foods as the sawtoothed grain beetle.
  • The rice weevil is about 2.1 to 2.8 mm in length and the Maize weevil is about 3.2 to 3.5 mm in length. Both of these weevils like to feed on whole grains, rice, corn, millet, rye, beans, bird seed, and caked meal.
  • The indian meal moth grows to about 9mm in length and likes to eat grain and grain products, dried fruits, seeds, crackers, nuts, candy, powdered milk, dry red peppers, dry pet food, cracked corn and cornmeal.

All of these pantry pests are often noticed once the infestation has already happened. Thus, you will have to find all foods which have become infested and get rid of them. Then, you will need to store everything else in the pantry in airtight containers so that they don’t infest anything else. The cupboards then will need to be washed and vacuumed.

Getting rid of pantry pests completely can be tricky, because so many of the methods used to eliminate them involve dangerous pesticides. At Slug-A-Bug, though, we have the knowledge and the tools to get rid of your pantry pests and keep them away without the dangerous pesticides. Contact us today to learn more about our Green 1st program and what we can do to help you get rid of pests now.