(Continued from Part 1.)
Results of Cornmeal in Sandwich Bags
As a side tangent, I wanted to know if weevils and their eggs in feed corn could survive being coarse ground into corn meal. Cornmeal is not ground as finely as wheat flour so I thought perhaps there was a small chance some eggs would survive. I put some weevily corn into the hopper of the grinder, added a bunch more weevils sifted out from some other corn, and ground it into meal.
After grinding, half of the meal was put into a mason jar with a sealed lid, the other half into a normal thin-walled sandwich bag. The meal in the mason jar would indicate if any eggs made it through the grinding process. The open sandwich bag sat on the counter for two months before it was zipped shut, hoping new pests of various sorts would enter. This would help establish the time larvae needed to chew through thin plastic.
No pests showed up in the mason jar during the six-month test, indicating weevils aren’t able to survive the grinding process. In the sandwich bag, after a few weeks I was unable to see any larvae but I did see particles of meal hanging from fine threads of web. The bag was then zipped closed. A few weeks later I finally saw larvae, and after a few months, many of the larvae had chewed their way out of the bag, one of which was halfway out when I saw it. The single threads of web had also turned into small mats of webbing in one end of the bag.Continue reading“Food Prepping With Freezer Bags – Part 2, by St. Funogas”
