Dhat’s embarrassing: Visitors come into the kitchen and, looking for something to offer them, you open a cupboard door – and a food moth flutters out. And with its flight show, the animal conveys the completely inaccurate impression that one has a rather relaxed relationship with questions of domestic hygiene. Irrespective of this, the matter is of course also unfortunate insofar as one does not want these animals in one’s food supplies.
A lot of trouble can be avoided by decanting food into jars. Nevertheless, it can catch you, for example, the animals are in a package of flour and therefore in the house. Experience teaches us that sticky pheromone traps do not solve the problem, the animals keep coming back. And it doesn’t look very nice either when the moths caught flutter around on the cards for days until they die. What shall we do? Cleaning the cupboards every three days with a red head? Or would you rather move out of the apartment right away?
The cycle of nature
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Bild: Kai Felmy
Parasited moth eggs
Oh no, a good horse never jumps higher than it has to: we let others work for us. In this case, parasitic wasps. “Please what?!” You may ask or think when you hear the word wasps. “I’m supposed to replace one disgusting animal with the next, so to speak exorcise the devil with the Beelzebub?”
Not at all. The parasitic wasps cannot be seen at all, they are only 0.3 to 0.4 millimeters in size. If you have very good eyesight, you will only see small black dots, smaller than the seeds on the poppy seed bun on Sunday morning. What you see are small white cards on which moth eggs parasitized by parasitic wasps are stuck.
You get three deliveries of these cards, each with four cards at an interval of three weeks. In this variant you get about 36,000 parasitic wasps delivered. Depending on the size of the kitchen, you can also order three times eight or three times twelve cards. Providers who sell Trichogramma parasitic wasps can be found on the Internet. In the variant with three times four cards, this costs around 40 euros.
You put the cards in the cupboard – about one card per shelf – the parasitic wasps hatch, look for the moth eggs in the area and parasitize them. The moth dies and a parasitic wasp develops.
As long as there are moth eggs, this cycle continues. If the parasitic wasps run out of moth eggs, they die. Anything that continues to hatch up to that point can still be caught with sticky traps. But after just a few days, there is a noticeable improvement. And soon the spook will be over.