From Park Slope comes this blood curdling report of monster moths: “[The moths are] goldeny and when you smoosh them they’re chalky…i found a mitten i’d left in a bag in my closet. (i’d been wondering why they kept flying out from the closet!) said mitten was missing a giant chunk. i’m not talking about a hole, i mean a quarter of the top of the mitten was gone, like a human had taken a bite from it.” Can the Slope be saved from this winged menace?–Daily Slope
Bklink: Attack of Mothra in the Slope
October 16th, 2008 · 2 Comments
Tags: Park Slope · Shortlink
2 responses so far ↓
1 bigmissfrenchie // Oct 16, 2008 at 1:27 pm
those moths are all over brooklyn…you see them in grocery stores all over the borough. I have had them in my house for years. they are impossible to get rid of since you can never pinpoint where the hell they come from. the best you can do is protect your stuff from them. i would suggest that you invest in some plastic storage bags with zippers for your woolens or come winter, you won’t have a single intact thing to wear!
2 arvid // Nov 1, 2008 at 8:54 pm
bigmissfrenchie’s wrong: The grocery moths and the wool-eating moths are QUITE different.
Clothes moths are manageable via the usual method: Store clothes in sealed bags, use mothballs (and follow directions), etc.
But those grocery moths are a whole diffferent deal: They’re called grain moths, pantry moths or or India moths; are brown-grey + quite tiny (they just look bigger when they flutter), and they do NOT eat wool:
They eat grains, cereal, flour, bird and plant seed, other seeds/nuts, pet kibble, even ground coffee, beans, or decorative stuff made of seeds, grains, grasses, etc.
— They’d only be in a clothes-closet if it (or the clothes pockets in it) also contained food.
— They also nest in those foods, leaving behind a fine white webbing.
— They’ll infest a home that has those foods open/available (even via a birdcage w/seed), or a store that has broken food packages or serve-yourself grain-and-cereal bins.
— Since they hide in food bags and boxes, you might inadvertently bring them home from an infested store. Or you might acquire them from an infested neighbor … and they’ll keep breeding if food’s available.
— They’re unaffected by mothballs and clothes-moth or other insect repellents. To get rid of ’em, you must
(a) check where they seem to congregate, clean out the whole house, and ditch ALL open/suspect grainstuff;
(b) buy a bunch of “pantry pest (or ‘pantry moth’) traps … which look like roach motels, but have a moth-attractant; a two-pak is usually $8+.
(c) avoid moth-filled stores, since the moths will hitch a ride home with you; and
(d) never leave food out; refrigerate it all.
These grain moths aren’t disease-y, but they’re annoying as hell — and hard to get rid of: It can take a couple of months of cleaning and “trapping” to eliminate the problem.