In article , Stephen
Henning wrote:
In article , says...
I know this is a gardening newsgroup, but does anyone know how to rid my
house of silverfish? I know they like dampness,and in the warmer months I
run a dehumidifier all the time and keep my humidity low, but here in the
north (it's snowing today!) the heat is still on and they have started
coming out. Is there a spray I can use or poder that will keep them
out of the house?
Not a spray, but bait packs. They are small pieces of cardboard that
contain a powder (20% boric acid powder). I have a lot of books and
don't want to risk silverfish damage to my books so I place these bait
packs on the book shelves behind the books. It has worked.
Silverfish will eat any paper they find in a dark out of the way place.
When you see old papers with pieces missing, it was the silver fish that
ate it.
Silverfish eat paper that is already damp & decaying, not otherwise.
Libraries of antiquarian books can have all the starchy glue eaten out of
the spine, & become "shaken" or "loose" in the binding, & they can get
under the cloth & loosen that from the bookboards; but the pages of such
old books are themselves unharmed & can be rebound. Silverfish have even
eaten the starch out of certain types of paint & canvass sizing, leaving
the paper or canvas that the painting was done on unharmed while
eradicating the artwork, & may eat the coloring off of valuable ephemera.
But in the mainly only if paper is damp & moldy -- in essence, already
destroyed -- will silverfish eat any of it.
When actual holes appear in books, paper, block prints, & so it, it is the
work of Sitodrepa paniceum or drugstore-beetle larvae, or sundry species
Anobium beetle including the "furniture beetle" that can drill through a
whole row of books & right through the bookshelf while its at it; the
Mexican book-beetle (Catorama mexicana), or for old leather books with
holes in the leather, Dermestes lardarius or Larder Beetle that drills
meat & leather; & many other sorts of larvae that look like minute
mealworms & which collectively gave rise to the common name "book worms,"
meaning persons of beetle larvae that devour books.
Silverfish are not a problem for modern books which are not glued with
starch & they do not eat paper. Bookworms however remain a problem since
they do eat paper.
Silverfish are primitive critters older than the dinosaurs. They are
thought to never stop growing & in theory can become extremely large
though they rarely live long enough to prove it. I once found a huge
two-century-old leather-bound book from Germany (of illustrated marchen) &
as I was delicately turning the pages to amaze at the artwork, there
dropped from out of the spine into my lap a silverfish an inch & a half
long & as big around on the big end as my thumb. I almost peed my pants.
-paghat the antiquarian bookseller
I bought mine from "Walter Drake".
They are available at:
http://www.wdrake.com/product_detail...tem_no=1005048
24 packs for $10.
If you google "silverfish packs" you will find others.
http://www.mileskimball.com/jump.jsp...ProductID=3341
has 24 packs for $8, a better buy.
http://store.doyourownpestcontrol.co...torefront/EN/p
roduct/KB153-6
has 144 packs for $40, a good buy for large quantities.
For complete product details check:
http://www.pesticideinfo.org/Detail_...1300001&DIST_N
R=070313
--
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http://www.paghat.com/giftshop.html
"History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden
people maintaining a free civil government." -Thomas Jefferson