Wow! Another creepy insect to tell you about. Roddy, one of our ace senior technicians, went to a client’s house this week who had inch-long, caterpillar-like creatures appearing on her kitchen counter every day, about a dozen at a time.

Roddy brought them to the office, and I identified them as meal worms. There are many different species, shapes and sizes of meal worms. However, the biology is the same. A meal worm is the larval stage of a beetle that lives on everything from dried cereals to potatoes. You usually bring them home in the products you buy from the grocery store, with the eggs from the insect and early larval stages already developing. By the time you begin to see them crawling around on counter tops and cabinets it is time to throw away all the products in that cabinet, since they will all be infested. Once you see the meal worms crawling around, they are looking for a place to pupate (make their cocoon) and metamorphose into adult beetles. Once the adult beetle comes out of the pupal stage, it finds another beetle, mates and lays very tiny eggs on the food products from whence they came, and the cycle starts all over again.

It’s all very gross, however the treatment is pretty basic. Throw away infested products, have a pest management professional perform a residual crack-and-crevice treatment in infested cabinet areas and fog with a pyrethrum aerosol, which will kill all stages of the insect.

Joe Arceneaux, BCE