Dear all, I hope you can help me because I'm going crazy here. I've been putting wood and gourd items into my commercial freezer, which goes down to -29°C and leaving them there for a month after detecting biscuit beetles (because nothing less seemed to do much - forget 3 days or a week). I have a data logger in there, so I know the temperature is definitely down there. The items go in from room temperature straight into -29°C because we keep the freezer on all the time It takes a datalogger wrapped in a bag as if it were an object less than 30mins to drop down to -29°C. Recently, I started having to put in objects that I had treated earlier this year apart from others as well. I've put in 37 objects since the 19th of September and still counting.
I noticed two days ago that there were biscuit beetles all around the rubber seals of my freezer, on the *outside*. When I brushed them off onto the ground, not a minute or two passed before they started waking up and moving. I have no funds or access to anoxia or heat treatments in my institution or out. All I have is the freezer, and now that doesn't seem to be working at all except for making the adults literally escape from the objects and squeeze themselves out through the rubber seals, after which I'm literally having to step on them to make sure they're dead. I still can't believe it. It seems the juveniles do get killed though, because I have been able to shake dead ones out of objects before. Other than having to buy lock & lock boxes and seal everything up individually after a time in the freezer, I don't know what else to do. I was trying to avoid chemicals at all costs, but if my employer (the State) refuses to buy more boxes, I will have to find something or risk losing the whole wooden and gourd collection (It's not that large). There is no such thing as reasoning with my employer, by the way. I have some thymol which I bought a couple years ago for absolute, last-minute measures, but I just don't know since I've heard about surface changes after thymol treatments plus the well-known contentious issues about health hazards. If I should be allowed to call in a professional fumigation service, would this be all right? Permethrins and all that? I don't have extraction, by the way. I don't even have a lab. We just have an office and the storage areas. I've experimented with putting isopropanol in with an object in a little jar to try and slowly gas them. I know it kills woodlouse, at least, for sure. I had to do a small, rather sad test with an unfortunate straggler. I just can't tell if it worked on this wooden stick I tried since it was too long for the freezer because there's so much frass inside it that I can't get out that it's hard to tell if it really worked although I did shake out several dead juveniles. I'm trying to be conservation conscious, humane, safe, and practical all at the same time, but I'm afraid something will have to give somewhere given my resources and circumstances. I really don't want to give up any of these things, though. Sorry for the super long e-mail, but I've tried to give as many details as I have at the moment. Any suggestions or help would be very, very, very much appreciated!!! -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Museumpests" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to pestlist+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to pestlist@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/pestlist. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/pestlist/00811bde-990f-4ce3-b2cf-664f841502eb%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
