"David Rance" wrote Has anyone else had an infestation of this
particular bean weevil? This
is going to be a bit long but please bear with me.
snip
Firstly where did this infestation come from?
snip

David, I've never come across a Bean Weevil, but I've seen plenty of
Golden Spider Beetle (Niptus hololeucus) and Australian Spider Beetle
(Ptinus tectus) in dried foods. (I used to be in Env. Health work). They
are fairly common in the UK and are roughly the same size - might these be
the culprits?

They usually come into the larder in bought, dried food (flour, biscuits,
etc.) although I have seen them in chocolate and they can bore through
foil wrapping into adjacent stored foods), so the source of the
infestation is sometimes difficult to determine.

The first signs are stray ones crawling around the kitchen (as you've
described). You can't use an insecticide around food; you just have to
throw away the infested foods and clean the cupboards. The other thing to
do is to then isolate susceptible foods in containers with sealed lids
(polythene is OK) for a few months until you are sure that the infestation
has gone (and any eggs you can't see are not viable).

I've had 2 problems with them myself (!) over the past 20 years: 1 came
from loose dog biscuits, the other from organic stone-ground flour. I'm
not libelling either product - just illustrating the range of foods that
can be involved. I have found that out-of-date foods tend to have the
heaviest infestations: I don't know if they just take a long time to
hatch out, or there is something in stale food that attracts them.

Good stock rotation is the key, although we've all got some 5-year-old bag
of something or other on our pantry shelves, somewhere. Haven't we?


- Tom.