Weevils, Weevils Everywhere – Hive and Nest

I remember my grandmother in North Carolina complaining about weevils all the time. Despite her lamenting that there were weevils everywhere I never saw one. Not, of course, until I moved to Texas.* I don’t know if they love warmth or humidity or what but this past year we have been taken over by weevils.  They are tiny little squiggly bugs that are especially fond of grains. So basically they eat everything in your house but pure sugar. They even climb into air fresheners and my wheat grinder!

I have gotten out the airtight bin that I keep oats in only to find it crawling with weevils. Same for the hot cocoa, spaghetti and dried lentils. It has been starting to chip away at my sanity.

Last month I went to make a lemon truffle pie. It’s my very favorite pie and requires the crust to be blind-baked first. My little trick for pre-baking an empty crust is to use an oven-safe bag filled with rice. After 15 minutes of baking I remove the bag of rice and continue to bake the crust til it’s golden brown. It works super well and I always reuse the same bag of rice since it’s never eaten. I’m sure you can guess what the bag looked like when I pulled it out of the cupboard.

Weevils all throughout! After throwing up in my mouth I checked to make sure there were no weevils on the outside of the bag. There weren’t, so being the pragmatic person that I am I decided to use the bag of rice anyway. A nice trip through a 375° oven should murder them all.**

Wrong. So, so wrong.

After being in the oven for 15 minutes they were still crawling all over the place!  WHAT???? How is that even possible? These stupid things are worse than cockroaches.

We tried bug-bombing the house.

Failure.

We tried spraying some sort of bug killer all around the baseboards.

Failure.

So I got out the no-pest strip. It says it is only for using in non-habited places: attics and empty rooms and such. Faced with the choice between a pantry crawling with bugs and harmful poison I did what any self-respecting American would do. I went for the poison.

I left the no-pest strip in the pantry for 24 hours. Voilà! Dead weevils everywhere! We’ll probably all develop cancer now or perhaps grow a third arm. But I can at least use that third arm to kill more weevils.

*For almost three years we had no weevils. But they started showing up after I bought some dried beans at Walmart. Seeing as how both weevils and Walmart are of the devil, that only makes sense.

**Putting stuff in the freezer also kills weevils. But I can’t exactly fit every item in my kitchen into the freezer so that option is a little impractical.