Fumigants

Doug Yanega dyanega at pop.ucr.edu
Tue Apr 20 19:52:58 EDT 1999


>Those damned dermestids love to much on my specimens too -  and it's
>usually the rare/irreplaceable/exceptional ones! Nothing beats PDB
>(paradichlorobenzene) for getting rid of these as well as Carpet
>beetles (another long time foe!)

Sorry to burst your bubble, but that's just not true. PDB is mostly a
repellent, and is only marginally toxic to dermestids, mostly in the larval
stage (Carpet Beetles *are* dermestids, incidentally - you've got only one
foe, not two). Accordingly, several things *do* beat it. See the following:

Date: Mon, 2 Oct 1995 15:13:56 -0400
Errors-To: pkevan at uoguelph.ca
Reply-To: entomo-l at uoguelph.ca
Originator: entomo-l at uoguelph.ca
Sender: entomo-l at uoguelph.ca
Precedence: bulk
From: slheydon at ucdavis.edu (Steve Heydon)
To: Multiple recipients of list <entomo-l at ccshst06.cs.uoguelph.ca>
Subject: Re: PDB & dermestids
X-Listprocessor-Version: 6.0c -- ListProcessor by Anastasios Kotsikonas
X-Comment: Entomology Discussion List


>        48 hours later, all larvae appear to be alive. However, the larvae
>with the PDB appeared to lose their locomotory abilities a couple of hours
>after the PDB was added. They have ignored the food, and just lie there
>with their legs twitching.
>
>                                                        Ken Philip

     I performed a similar experiment a couple of years ago and found that
PDB had no effect on dermestid eggs at all. They all hatched in a PDB
saturated evironment. The adults were also quite resistant and probably
live long enough to mate and lay eggs. As Ken mentioned, it takes about a
week or more for full grown larvae to actually die in a PDB saturated
environment. The really succeptible stage is the early instar larva. These
died virtually overnight. I do not know about other places, but we seem to
have about one generation of dermestids per year (based mainly on
observations of beetles in the Briggs Hall stairwell, but also from an
experimental colony formerly held in the museum). The adults come out in
late spring-early summer. Therefore, to achieve the maximum effect with the
minimum exposure to ourselves, I aim to do most of our spot treatment of
drawers during the summer months.

Steve Heydon
slheydon at ucdavis.edu


Doug Yanega       Dept. of Entomology           Entomology Research Museum
Univ. of California - Riverside, Riverside, CA 92521
phone: (909) 787-4315
                  http://www.icb.ufmg.br/~dyanega/
  "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness
        is the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 82



More information about the Leps-l mailing list