Rice Weevils In The Bird Seed
Bugs All Over The Kitchen!
We received a call from a customer reporting how they had discovered tiny bugs or beetles all over the kitchen and inside various different food items.
This is a common call and as always we were quick to respond and accurately identify these tiny bugs.
once we arrived we took a look at one of the bugs under our 40x magnifier and looked for the most distinguishing features of the insect.
You can see on the photos that these bugs have six legs (insects) and look like they have a long nose which means these are likely weevils.
Weevils like all insects have a body made up of three main part (head, thorax and abdomen), and if you look at the abdomen, especially the top weevil, it has four light coloured spots or patches on it. This was enough to clearly identify them as rice weevils.
Where were the bugs coming from?
After we checked all the most common places in the house and kitchen we finally found what we were looking for. A bag of bird seed tucked away at the back of a kitchen cabinet was about to reveal its secrets.
As we lifted out the bag of seed you could immediately see the seed moving inside the bag and a large number of weevils around the top of the open bag.
What pesticides did we use to control the rice weevils?
We used nothing! When you are lucky enough to discover the source of an infestation, you might be fortunate and simply remove it from the building.
In this case the bird seed was binned and the customer was delighted to put the whole experience behind them.
It was just another example of how we used our technical knowledge and skills to solve a pest problem without using pesticides while saving the customer money.
