Flour beetles!!! >:(

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Have had problems with finding teeny little black beetles overrun in my flour in the past. I presume these are flour beetles??

Just had to throw out a bag of wholemeal self-raising that still had 3/4 left in it. NOT happy!

Am I keeping flour unused too long (I don't get time to bake much anymore)? Is it just bad luck? Do I need to store it in a jar or something?

It's so gross!

Keep it in the freezer so they don't hatch.

They're weevils I understand and they appear now because there are less additives in flour. In the 80s your parents and mine could keep flour for decades without so much as a sniff of a weevil.
What I do is only buy the smaller bags. then it all gets used before the weevils come. Otherwise you end up at 9pm the night before the school fair sieving the weevils out. That doesn't work too well.............

Been there, done that - flour weevils are vile little critters!

Infestation usually starts in the flour mill then gets worse in supermarket storage/on the shelf. Most retailers will let you swop a contaminated bag of flour for a replacement. I bake a lot and tend to now open the bag of flour at the checkout to check for little wrigglers - ironically, the posh/premium/organic flours seem to suffer this the most! Have read mixed reports about the potential danger of weevil in flour but apparently their feasting on your flour and the resulting weevil poo isn't a good thing to be in your kitchen and definitely not good to eat!

I read that keeping flour in the fridge keeps them at bay, but with so many types of flour the fridge can become cluttered.

If you put the flour in the freezer for a spell then transfer it to a clean storage jar with seal/lid that should do the trick nicely.

Both these methods (courtesy of MN) have worked for me - haven't seem a weevil since!

Do they only live in flour, or will they go for other dry goods like pasta, biscuits etc? Found some little black beetles on the flour I was going to use for cake, but they seemed to be around the opening rather than having come out of the flour itself IYSWIM?

I find that they seem to appear sooner in bags of flour. I started buying the homepride boxes with a clip lid and haven't had to throw any out yet but it may just be luck/coincidence.

Just wondering if I need to do a full scale cupboard clearout to avoid getting reinfested

They can get into anything, so check all packets and clear out anything open in the same cupboard. Wipe down all the packers/ containers and all the shelves too.

Apparently bay leaves can deter them.

I read that it was good to store opened packets of flour in bags that can be sealed so if you do have an outbreak they don't spread.

Oh no, beetles can hatch in flour? I didn't know this and now I'm going to be frightened of it happening. I still haven't gotten over the Great Caterpillar in the Broccoli Incident of 2012.

I'm with fairgame. I bake a lot, and have found that the only beastie-free flour is Homepride in the sealable boxes. It pains me to buy it, as it's more expensive than own-brand, but every time I cave in and give bagged flour a go, I end up throwing it away. . This is after standing peering at it for ages, until I see little creatures walking around. Mine are usually pale, though, so quite hard to spot.

I often wonder how many people just use the flour without checking? Bleurgh!

They live in the crevices in the cupboard so once you have them they are a bugger to get rid of.

So every package into a plastic container. Every one, flour, herbs everything. Clear out the cupboard using a bleach solution and dry well. Keep an eye on the contents on the bags and chuck any that show signs of infestation.

Moving house was the only thing that got rid of mine in the end and my exdh was an environmental health officer so was well equipped to debug!

I had these the other week. I didn't see any of the weevils, just the larvae.

They had even got into some of my supposedly sealed storage jars. I had to ditch a lot of stuff then I steamed the cupboard to kill anything that might be lurking.

After reading about it, I am now going to store anything like flour in the freezer for several days after I buy it because this kills any bugs in the packet.

I ate weevils once, it was fine.
I mean, I wouldn't recommend it or anything but it didn't make any of us ill.

When the other option was binning a beautiful cake and leaving us pudding-less we decreed the consumption of a few bugs to be the the lesser of two weevils.

Tempting fate here, but we haven't had them for ages. When we did, I got rid of all flour, cleaned out the cupboard, and double bagged all new purchases so that they were isolated from each other and from the cupboard. Now flour goes straight into well sealed jars so if we were to get reinfested it would only be one jar.

"Lesser of the two weevils"

Look at everything in the cupboard. Clean with bleach it bicarb solution. Everything goes into sealed airtight jars. And don't keep things too long.

They destroyed my maturing Xmas pud. I hope it upset their tummies.

I had no idea they could get into other things. I've only ever seen them in flour. I will check everything properly before i use it now.
Thanks for enlightening me Mnetters

I had a couple of boxes of porridge oats in the pantry, which I had to bin too. Anything not 100% sealed seems fair game to the little buggers.

I have never seen a flour beetle ever in my flour.

was afraid it'd be a total cleanout.

Have already binned all flour, & new pack is living in freezer. Unfortunately I don't think our lodger is capable of complying (not through malice, but obliviousness), so it may be pointless to bleach everything till she's moved out.

They don't live on boxes of herbal tea, do they? Billions of those around....