Hello folks, We've had a problem with red-legged ham beetles in our (moderately extensive) mammal teaching collection for years now. They got in by infesting our outdoor dermestid colony and riding in on the cleaned specimens. I was pretty vigilant about freezing skeletal material that came out of the colony, but either I wasn't vigilant enough, or RLHBs aren't killed by treatment in a standard chest freezer.
In any case, they are horribly tenacious. At various times we have isolated/bagged material, froze material in the -80, multiple treatments of diatomaceous earth. But we can't bag everything because it's the teaching collection and gets regular use, and the RLHBs keep showing up again. Has anyone successfully eradicated these critters? If so, how? At this point we are even considering using a nasty pesticide if it will work, especially since the classes that would use the collection are remote right now, so the students are out of harm's way for a while. -Suellen Suellen Jacob Vertebrate Collections Manager Department of Biological Sciences California State University, Long Beach suellen.ja...@csulb.edu<mailto:suellen.ja...@csulb.edu> -- 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 view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/pestlist/BY5PR12MB376178B039A0A5665FF04BFAE8570%40BY5PR12MB3761.namprd12.prod.outlook.com.
