Have you ever seen those little worms in your household goods like your flower and cereal? These are called mealybugs, but they can come in all sorts of varieties and go by all sorts of names. Most of these are simply bugs that are associated with the grain products that you have in your home. They happen when you have something that might have gotten a little damp, isn’t used very often, and might be stored somewhere out of the way, like a basement or a pantry. There are many different forms of mealy bugs, but the most common is the yellow mealworm, which is actually the largest insect that can infest your grain products. The adult form of this bug is actually a black beetle that is about a half of an inch long. If you have full grown meal worms, you are going to see full grown yellow mealybugs that are an inch long, tubular, and hard shelled. These bugs usually grown for up to a year before they become adult beetles.

Most of the time, a common way that infestations occur is that the mealybugs grown by the hundreds and thousands in bags of pet food kept at a pet store. When you bring home a bag that has been infected, you actually can infest the rest of your pantry.

Once you have a mealybug problem, there isn’t a lot you can do about it. Luckily, these bugs are usually found only in the foods that they infest. This means that if you have a carton of flour or something that has been infested with mealybugs, you can throw it out, and you aren’t going to have them in the rest of your home. Be sure, of course, to throw them outside and not into the garbage can in your home, because they could spread this way.

The best way to protect yourself against mealybugs in the first place is to be careful about how you store your food, especially your grain products. You want to dump things into airtight containers that won’t let moisture in. You always want to be sure to keep your products only until they expire, and once they are too old to use you want to throw them away. Be sure that you aren’t storing bags of grain products on top of one another, because if one is infected with mealybugs, you are going to find that they are able to tunnel through the bags and end up in the other one. You should store each grain product separate from each other, and keep them in plastic bins with lids. This will help to control the temperature, and to lessen the chances that mealy bugs will develop in them.

Remember that a lot has to do with where you are buying your products. See that you are purchasing grain products that have been sold and stored above the floor level.  You can’t do much to insure that you know how they were packaged, so no matter how careful you are there is always a chance that you will open something up to find mealybugs. However, it isn’t the end of the world, because they are fairly easy to get rid of. The food is obviously ruined, but you can prevent them from spreading to the rest of your home if you have a clean pantry and kitchen. Clean homes are the way to really solve the mealybug problem and to not have them reoccur. If you are concerned about your products, you should check each of them for mealybugs and then store them each separately in plastic containers. This will lesson your chances of getting them in your food and having to deal with them later.

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