The last of the moth-infected stuff from the studio is sitting in my kitchen, waiting to be cycled through the oven. Yeah, you heard me. I’m still at this. A week later. I have two bolts of silk, an alpaca fleece, and a couple of bags of llama fiber left. I should be done with that part today. Then I have to go through every closet and storage box in the house and deal with the clothes.
The part that is really killing me, though, is the sheer amount
of plastic this requires. I was planning on moving my stash out of plastic over the coming years,
and into fabric-lined lidded baskets. Well, no more my friends. I am not bloody
doing this twice, I can tell you that right now. So everything is being processed
to kill the moths, then bagged in 4mm clear plastic bags and put into plastic
totes. The totes have already been washed with hot soapy water, and then
sprayed with moth repelling essential oils while still hot. Plastic, being
porous, sucks up the oils and stays smelly pretty much forever. Then I lob two
moth repelling sachets into the tote, spritz it with diatomaceous earth, and
then tape the whole thing shut with packing tape. I like to wear a belt and
suspenders on my overalls in such situations.
The theory behind all of this? You may want to sit down for
this part, because I have (of necessity) become something of an expert at
killing these horrid white squirmy monsters.
Exterminate the
Beasties
First, you have to get the dirty rotten so-and-sos to stop
chewing holes in your things. You do
that by killing them. You can freeze them, which kills the adults and the
larvae, but it does not kill the eggs. You have to freeze your stuff for a
minimum of three days, thaw it, let the eggs hatch, and freeze it again. As the
hatching takes four to ten days in warm weather, you should repeat the freezing
in about two weeks to make sure you got everything. Given the absolute WALL of
plastic totes behind me, and the tiny amount of available freezer space not
taken up by food, that method would have taken me months. So I opted for heat
instead. Thirty minutes at temperatures over 120 degrees F (49 degrees C) will
kill all stages of clothing moth; egg, larvae, and adult alike. Sign me up.
So I set my oven to 200 degrees F (93 degrees C) and ran
everything through for thirty minutes. I want to make sure nothing survives. Will the temperature hurt the fiber? Nope.
Know how I know? When you iron wool and silk, you do so at about 300 degrees F.
In fact, any temperature under 392 degrees F is perfectly safe. Yeah, I looked
it up. There is one caveat, and on this one I got lucky. You cannot do this to
a raw sheep fleece. The lanolin melts at those temperatures (anything above 100
degrees F), and when allowed to cool, it chemically changes and becomes almost
impossible to remove. Once the wool has been scoured it has already had most of
the lanolin removed, and all chemical changes have already been wrought, so
clean wool and yarn are perfectly safe to bake. My luck? I had only one raw sheep fleece, and
it was so infested it went straight into the trash. The alpaca and llama fiber
have no lanolin, and are thus completely safe to bake, even raw (which really
just means sandy).
A word on other methods of extermination. There are several,
and I’d like to take a moment to discuss why you should not do them, if at all
possible. First, there is dry ice fumigation. You do this by enclosing the
material in air tight plastic, putting a small piece of dry ice in the bottom,
and sealing it shut. You leave it for at least three days. This kills all
stages of moth, but dry ice is difficult to get in many places, and you run the
risk of frostbite. This would be an excellent method, however, for saving a
piece of wool or horsehair stuffed furniture, if you could not take it outside
and freeze it.
You can dry-clean your things, which kills everything, and
removes any attractive staining. Dry-cleaning chemicals, however, are
notoriously toxic, and if you have a large number of things to save, it could
be quite costly. The same goes for chemicals used by professional
exterminators, though permethrin (made from orange peels) is safe enough for
people, as long as you have no cats or fish in the house. For them, it is
extraordinarily toxic. We have five cats, so this one is absolutely off the
list for us.
Prevention
So, once the moths are dead, how do you keep them from
re-infesting your things? The problem with these guys is that they don’t just
infest your clothes or yarn. They infest your house, too. Which means that
unless you take steps, you’ll be right back where you started. Understanding
how to prevent a moth infestation (which would have been so much smarter of me
in the FIRST PLACE) starts with understanding the life-cycle of the clothing
moth. This is going to get a little nuts.
The whole thing starts with a pregnant female moth. She’s
looking for a place to lay her eggs, and she finds it by following her nose.
She is afraid of the light, and not a very good flyer. This means that she’ll
hide quite well, and you will likely not ever see her. If you do, she will be
more likely to run away from you than fly. She will lay anywhere between 30 and
200 eggs in any animal hair (wool, alpaca, cashmere, angora, fur, discarded
human hair, etc.), protein fiber (silk), or in fact, in grain. Damp, stained,
or smelly things are vastly preferred, because the caterpillars do not drink,
and must get their moisture from their food. With that said, live caterpillars
have been found in bags of salt. No kidding. I told you this was ridiculous.
The eggs take four to ten days to hatch. Once they do, they
start eating whatever they were laid in. Often, it is your favorite cashmere
sweater. For me, it was my fiber stash. As they feed, they spin a webbing mat,
which they hide under. This mat typically contains dye and fiber from whatever
they are eating, so detecting them can be almost impossible. Usually the first
symptom of an infestation is moth holes in your best wool suit. They will
continue to feed at a rate determined by temperature and humidity. The colder
and dryer it is, the longer it takes. Larvae will hatch and grow at
temperatures ranging from 50 degrees F (10 degrees C) to 91 degrees F (33
degrees C), with ideal conditions being about 75 degrees F (24 degrees C) and
70-75% relative humidity. This stage can take as little as a month… or as long
as two years. Yeah, I kinda wanted to cry at that one.
Once they have gorged themselves on your hand knit socks,
they spin themselves cocoons, and become pupae. Now here’s the tricky part.
They often actually crawl away from their food source in order to do this. This
means that they can crawl off your woolens and onto something that is cotton,
viscose, or synthetic. Thus it is EXTREMELY important to wash everything in the infected area. Do not
skimp out here, or you may be sorry. Once they are cocooned, they will spend 10
to 50 days transforming into adults.
After the adults emerge from their cocoons, it is important
to understand that they do not, and in fact cannot eat. It is only the larvae
who do the damage. The adults do not even have working mouth parts. An adult
female clothing moth will mate, and lay her eggs, and she has only about 15
days in which to do this. Males will live a bit longer (figures, right?); about
30 days. Males find the females by using their nose as well. The females give
off a very specific pheromone. We’ll get back to that later.
So how does all of this help us prevent infestation, or
re-infestation? Let’s start with our adult female moth, shall we? After all, no
eggs mean no hungry hungry caterpillars. The first, most excellent prevention
method is as simple as a barrier. If the moths cannot get to the woolens, they
cannot lay their eggs in them. Makes sense, right? Well, clothing moths are
TINY. So the only way to be completely sure is to encase everything in
air-tight plastic. I know, I know, it makes me crazy too. Just bite the bullet
and do it. If you really can’t stomach it, or if (heaven forbid) you actually
want to use some of the things you
own, there are some different measures you can take.
In addition to the barrier method, you can employ a
substance called diatomaceous earth. It is the fossilized remains of
microscopic sea creatures, and comes as a powder. For any animal without an
exoskeleton it is completely harmless (caveat – don’t breathe in a ton of it,
it is still a powder, after all). But to creatures who carry their bones on the
outside, it is quite deadly. We have used it for years to keep the house free
of fleas. It gets in between the plates of the exoskeleton and rubs, causing
tiny scratches. The insects actually die of dehydration, so the one thing to
remember is that it absolutely does not work once it gets wet. As soon as it is
dry again, however, you’re back in business. It is a physiological death
mechanism, and thus there is no adapting to it. In addition, there is a food
grade variety (which is the only one you should be buying) that has no
additives. It is designed to be added to grain products, such as flour, to keep
the weevils out. If you eat grain, you are already eating diatomaceous earth.
One of the things about re-learning an older way of life is
that occasionally something that you always saw as quaint suddenly becomes
quite obviously not. One of those things is the extraordinary measures that
people used to go to in order to prevent clothing moths from entering the
house. All those little bowls of potpourri and sachets of sweet smelling herbs
tucked away in drawers? Yeah, they were not because women had so much time on
their hands that they had nothing better to do than sit around and sew dainty
smelly things. Let me tell you. It was to avoid exactly what I am going through
right now, which is engaging in furious and pitched battle with something about
a million times smaller than I am. And yes, it is just about as ridiculous as
it sounds.
You see, those various sweet smelling herbs, well, to a
clothes moth, they smell like week old human waste, dipped in stink solution,
which has then been vomited up and left in the sun for a while. In addition to
that, depending on the herbs, they can actually kill the smaller caterpillars.
This is not a quaint custom, it actually works. Potpourri was originally
intended to protect the furniture in the room, which was often stuffed with
horse hair or down and covered in wool. This same effect can be achieved by
using sachets, and also by spritzing with essential oil blends. Some of the
herbs and oils in question include: wormwood, lavender, cedar, rosemary, cloves,
mint, camphor, orange or lemon peel (again, only if you don’t have cats or
fish), lemongrass, eucalyptus, peppermint, thyme, and cinnamon.
For the larvae and eggs, the best prevention method is
vacuuming. A lot. If they have nothing to eat, the moths will go elsewhere, and
even small amounts of pet hair can keep a small infestation active. Vacuuming
destroys eggs, as does taking your things out into the sunshine and brushing
them. Light exposure will cause the larvae to drop off your garments, so this
is best done outside. Remember, the adult moths don’t like light either, so
exposing your stuff will keep them at bay as well. Doing this once a week often
solves the infestation problem without need to resort to chemicals. But
seriously, you might want to do everything listed here.
So, about those pheromones that attract the males? Well,
some very clever folks applied them to some sticky traps. They attract only the males, which keeps the females
and the eggs from setting up shop, as there is no one to fertilize them. This
is an excellent extermination method, as well as prevention and monitoring.
Simply set out the traps, and if you find any moths in it, you have yourself a
problem. If you don’t find any, just leave the trap out for up to three months,
and keep changing them out. These little cardboard tents also act as a kind of
early warning system. If you do have
an infestation, the number of males caught in the traps will tell you how fares
the battle, and it will tell you (with reasonable certainty) when the battle is
over. Keep putting out traps, however, for at least six more months. Better
safe than sorry.
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