How to Deal With the Dreaded Pantry Moth

Pantry moths must be loving 2020, especially the early days of the pandemic, when panicked hoards (ourselves included) ran to Costco to stockpile toilet paper, flour and Tostitos.

While I’ve probably blogged about pantry moths more times than just about anything else, we just had another outbreak and I thought I’d use this post writing exercise as an excuse to re-read UC Davis’ Integrated Pest Management pantry moths fact sheet.

According to geniuses at UC Davis, management is simple and pesticide-free. All your food needs to go into jars with tight fitting lids. No shoving rubber-banded packages of couscous in the back of the shelf. If you have space in your freezer you can put dry goods in there and kill any larvae. Avoid adding new food to old food, if possible.

If you’ve got an outbreak UC Davis suggests pulling everything out and inspecting what you’ve got for the telltale signs of infestation: larvae or webbing. Get our you vacuum and suck out the larvae that hide in cracks in your cabinets. These bugs can survive for months without food. Wash cabinets with soap and water. Freeze stuff you’re in doubt about. To repeat, put everything, including pet food, in jars with tight fitting lids.

Pheromone traps can help spot an infestation as well as reduce the population, but they are not a substitute for cleaning and putting things in jars.

Incidentally, what we call “pantry moths” encompass a variety of different insects with colorful names such as the Drugstore Beetle, and the Confused Flour Beetle. All these bug-a-boos just love post-agricultural human habits of storin’ up food. Like cats, roaches and mice they’re with us until we devolve away from our agricultural ways, “By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground.” I’ll add, of course, that even if we find a way to keep eating and stop sweating I’d like to keep the cats around.

Kelly and Chocineal

First off, many thanks to all of you for the well wishes for Kelly. She made it home and up the 30 steps to the house yesterday. The first few weeks after open heart surgery are rough and she’s, obviously, taking it easy today. Is suspect she’ll be up and about faster than after the emergency surgery of four years ago but she’s still in for a long recovery.

Because of Covid I couldn’t visit her in the hospital so I puttered in the garden to distract myself. During the puttering I discovered that our prickly pear cactus has became a host for the cochineal bug. A lot of the prickly pear in our neighborhood has cochineal but, for some reason, it never made it to our place until this year.

The cochineal bug (Dactylopius coccus) is a scale insect that produces carminic acid which is extracted for use as a red textile and food dye. I thought cochineal dying might make for the perfect quarantine craft project until I did some research.  Like many things worth doing, harvesting and dying textiles with cochineal is a process that takes experience and skill.

The Zapotec people of Oaxaca have been practicing this skill for a thousand years. In the video above you can see how cochineal is harvested and some spectacular dye work.

The Other TickTalk

Got ticks? Like scientists who pun? The University of Massachusetts Amherst has a free series of webinars on the biology of ticks. You can watch live or look at the archived videos.

Each month we will hear from Dr. Stephen Rich and the Laboratory of Medical Zoology (LMZ)! TickTalk in 2020 will also feature exciting guest speakers on tick topics that you told us were important to YOU. The series will include seasonality and life stages of ticks (key to planning intervention and prevention), emerging or invasive tick species, how ticks use vegetation and leaf litter throughout their life cycle, increasing fears of Alpha-gal allergies (allergies to certain meat and animal-related products), dispelling myths of tick control, and many more. Mosquito concerns, including life cycle, behavior, and EEE infection, will also be addressed and Dr. Rich will discuss the tens of thousands of mosquitoes the LMZ tests each year for a range of viruses. Tune in the 2nd Wednesday of the month!

Come for the ticks stay for the mosquitoes!

Murder Hornets: It’s What’s for Dinner

I freak out when the media covers something that I have even a modest amount of specialized knowledge in. Why? Because the lamestream media almost always gets the story completely wrong. This leaves you to wonder what else the media is screwing up.

When people who know that I keep bees started texting me about the so-called “murder hornet” I smelled social media click bait trap. Even the allegedly reliable New York Times did a whole podcast on the Asian giant hornet (Vespa mandarinia) that consisted of an interview with a single beekeeper and a lot of scary music. Did any of these journalists, including the New York Times bother to call up an entomologist who specialized in hornets? Not so much.

Lynn Kimsey, director of the Bohart Museum of Entomology and professor of entomology, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology had this to say,

The colony everyone is hyperventilating over was actually found on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, last September when it was destroyed and then a single, dead hornet was found in December in Blaine, Wash. There is no evidence that there are any more hornets in the vicinity of Vancouver or anywhere else on the West Coast.

So it’s not even recent news.

My inner Jungian doesn’t think it’s a coincidence that, during a pandemic that originated in Asia, we’d see a viral news story that contains the words “murder” and “Asian.” Could it be that the story of a scary, foreign insect acts as a way of deflecting, on a subconscious level, blame for our own stupidity in the face of a crisis we could well have been better prepared for? I also don’t think it’s any coincidence that the “Africanized” bee scare came around the same time as the infamous Willie Horton attack ad. I’m not asserting a simple causal relationship between insect scares and racialized politics, but let’s just say that our storytelling tends towards the monstrous (with race and class overtones) during times of crisis. The “murder” in the name isn’t even an accurate translation. The Japanese word actually means “yellow” reflecting the color of the insect.

Could the Asian giant hornet become a problem in North America? Yes. But there’s no evidence that it has yet. And, as this insect lives in forests, its habitat would be limited if it did. Giant Asian hornets don’t live in cities nor do they tolerate hot or cold weather.

If they do establish here, at least they are edible and, apparently, taste like French Fries according to entomologist Matan Shelomi. There’s pictures and harvesting directions to prove it if you follow the link. The murder hornet looks tasty when deep fried. But what doesn’t?

For more information see this fact sheet on the Asian giant hornet from Washington State University.

If you’d like to meme about “murder” hornets there’s a Facebook group for you.

There’s a term for when the media covers something that you have specialized knowledge in and the horror that ensues when you see how badly they get it wrong that I can’t recall and it’s bugging me (so to speak). This term/phrase is named after a best selling author who noted this phenomena–please leave a comment if you can help me remember!

Paper Wasps: Your New BFFs

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We don’t spend nearly enough time admiring the works of nature, because we are too busy admiring ourselves. Sure, humans invented smartphones, but what is a smartphone compared to an acorn? The thing is, the more you learn about nature, the more you learn about it, the more it blows your mind.

All this summer I’ve been fascinated with Polistes dominula, the European paper wasp. In North America there is a native paper wasp, which is quite similar, but the non-native European variant is more the wasp you will  likely be dealing with in urban/suburban North America, because unlike their native counterparts, Euro wasps aren’t shy. They are the ones who will build a nest by your back door, or on the side of your mailbox. Paper wasps build those distinctive, easy to recognize papery nests made of many cells. There are other types of native wasps which build with different materials, such as mud. Honeybee colonies, of course, are made of wax, and in cold climates you’ll never see those just hanging out in the open air. Honeybees like to build inside cavities.

Polistes dominula really like our front porch, and every year we host a colony out there. The nest rarely exceeds the size of a tennis ball. This year, though, it is more than twice that size. This is our fault. We did not knock down the previous year’s empty nest, so they were able to reuse it and get a real jump start in terms of colony size. (Generally they don’t like to reuse nests, but can do so– in this case the queen started a new nest next to the old nest and annexed it as she built).

img_7454So the population of wasps is accordingly quite large, and perhaps a bit worrisome to visitors, who make it up our stairs only to be confronted with a large wasp nest by the door. Yet we have not had any bad encounters with our waspish neighbors. In fact, we’ve never had a single problem with our porch wasps ever, not one sting, despite the fact the like to nest a couple feet from our front door, despite the fact I hang laundry all around them, despite the fact that Erik’s favorite chair is just beneath them

They truly are peaceable creatures, which is why it saddens me when I hear that someone panicking about a wasp nest, calling the exterminator or heading off to the big box store for a can of poison. When I hear about this, I always want to bring up a few points:

  1. Paper wasps are, as I’ve said, peaceable unless their nest is disturbed. The process of trying to get rid of them is what makes them ornery.
  2. They should not be confused with yellow jackets, those reviled picnic crashers who are attracted to meat and like to hang out on the lips of your soda can. Those guys live in underground nests. Your resident paper wasps will not hassle you if you’re doing backyard grilling or enjoying lemonade on the porch. They don’t like our food.
  3. Wasps are seasonal creatures. They build their nests in the spring and the colony disperses in the fall. You can solve your wasp “problem” by simply waiting it out. If you don’t bother them, they won’t bother you! Wait til they die off in the fall, knock the old nest down, and next spring, keep your eye out for any single wasps trying to establish nests in your space. That would be a queen trying to start a new colony. It is a lot easier to discourage a single wasp than to wait and deal with a full populated nest. But I never discourage them, because…
  4. Wasps are a gardener’s best friend! Sure, ladybugs are cute and all, but wasps are stone cold killers working for your benefit, like your own army of mini Dexters. Their favorite prey is caterpillars, e.g. your arch enemies the cabbage lopers and hornworms, but they are also fond of aphids. They swoop down on garden pests like tiny eagles–or flying monkeys–or homicidal Amazon drones– and drag their ravaged bodies back to the nest to the nest to feed their babies. Only the larvae are carnivorous. The adults live on nectar, so wasps are both pest hunters AND valuable pollinators. You want a healthy garden? Host a paper wasp colony.

These are my arguments for adopting a tolerant attitude for paper wasps around your house. Here are some more cool things to know about them:

Only fertile queens survive the winter. The rest of the colony disperses and dies. The fertile queens mate one last time in the fall, and then find some little nook in which to hibernate over the winter (this is amazing to me and I haven’t found any details about it yet.)  In the early spring she emerges and builds a tiny nest, like maybe six cells, to generate a first generation of workers to help her out.

These workers are female, as with the bees, and as soon as they hatch they get to work on enlarging the nest and feeding and tending the next generation of workers. So when you look at a paper wasp nest, this is what they are doing. The wasp nest is a fairly mellow place compared to the extremely crowded, restless interior of the honeybee hive. If you watch a wasp nest, mostly they just seem to be hanging out there, while a few come and go. What they are actually doing, as far as I can figure, is slowly masticating wood pulp to make new cells, or stuffing caterpillars down larvae mouths.  They are daylight creatures, so during the day the nest will only have a few wasps on it, whereas in the evening they will all come home and every inch will be covered with huddled bodies.

I’d love to take a closer look at all this, but as mellow as our relationship might be, I’m not sticking my nose inches from their nest! Someday, though, maybe we can set up a spy camera.

Here is one of those jaw dropping natural science facts: wasps choose the destiny of the developing larvae in the nest– whether will they be workers or “founders” — that is, fertile wasps. They influence this by vibration, by drumming with their antennae. These vibrations alter the gene expression of the larvae, pushing them one way or the other.

If I’ve got my facts right, the males are produced only with the purpose of breeding–like honeybee drones, they do not work. The wasp queen is mobile, so she can choose to mate with males in her own nest, or to go out on the town looking for love– and more often she chooses non-nestmates. Which I understand, because more than likely their nestmates leave the toilet seat up all the time.  Freewheeling males attract fertile queens by staking out key landmarks, such as trees, and marking the leaves and stems with scent. I believe they prefer Drakkar Noir.

I’m feeling a little bittersweet, sitting on the couch, admiring our wasps and knowing that their days are numbered by winter–even a winter as insubstatial as the one we have here in LA. The other day something unusual happened at the nest: suddenly, most of them were airborne and swirling in circles around our porch. This is something I’ve never seen before. I only noticed because I heard the “tip-tap” of wasp bodies hitting the glass of our front door. At first I thought they might have been attacked by a bird or something, and were all riled up, but after watching for a while, I realized they didn’t seem angry, and in fact, it reminded me of something the honeybees do called orientation. Whenever a new batch of workers is hatched in a hive, they all flow out of the hive and circle around it in a big cloud for a few minutes. They are learning how to recognize the hive so they can locate it when they go out in the world. It looks crazy for a couple of minutes, and then ends as abruptly as it started. It was the same case with the wasps– the party (?) lasted for only 15 minutes or so, but was pretty impressive while it lasted. I imagined it might terrify some folks, who would assume the wasps were swarming and up to no good. I wondered if perhaps they’d just hatched their batch of males for their fall mating, the last party of the year. Maybe those males were orienting, or maybe they were all dancing their last, joyous dance before the quiet of winter sends them all to sleep.

For a complete run down of the wasp life-cycle, the University of Michigan’s Animal Diversity Web provides a really detailed read.