Weevils in Your Food, How to Deal With It.

I am sure you have all opened a box of food from your pantry and have found weevils.  They are little black bugs that seem to be everywhere and spread rapidly through your food.  They chew through plastic bags and cardboard.

Once they get into a food, the female weevil lays an egg inside a grain kernel.  One female weevil can lay up to 250 eggs.  The egg then hatches and  the larva lives inside and feeds on the kernel for one to five months depending on the weather and time of year.

The full grown weevil then emerges from the kernel to eat and mate.

The foods that you realty need to pay attention to are whole grains, seeds, rice, nuts, dried beans, cereals, corn, and similar foods.

Now of cause the best solution is to store the food correctly so that you do not have a weevil problem.  This means store your food in metal cans, glass container, Mylar bags or thick plastic containers, not zip lock type bags, weevils will chew through them.  

If you pack grain with weevils in it using metal cans or Mylar bags with oxygen absorbers, the lack of oxygen will kill the weevils.  

Here are some links on how to store your grains and legumes to prevent the growth of weevils:

• Oxygen Absorbers 

• Sealing Food in 5 Gallon Buckets

• Dry Pack Canning

But what do you do when TEOTWAWKI has arrived and you open your food and find weevils?  You have several choices.  First if it is just a few, you have extra protein.  I have eaten them on many occasions and so have you. 

They are in many commercially processed foods waiting to hatch.  The FDA even has an allowance for how many insects parts can be allowed in foods. 

If there are more, or you can’t tolerate the thought of consuming weevils.  There are a couple of other solutions.

Weevils tend to float, so simply fill a pan of grain with water and wait for them to float to the surface.  Do this a couple of times and most of the weevils will be gone.

If the weather is right, spread the grain out in hot bright sun, no more than ½ inch deep.  Stir it a couple of times to make sure they are all exposed.  The weevils don’t like the sun and will leave on their own.

Putting them in a solar oven and heating to 140 degrees F for 15 minutes will kill weevils.

If you still have power you can place the grain in the freezer. This will kill them if you freeze them at 0 degrees F for 3 days.

The bottom line is that eating weevils wont hurt you, it just extra protein.

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