Cleaning grain before grinding? YIKES! bugs!
I am 66 and bought my first wheat grinder when I was 20 - so 46 years and I just learned something new today.
I normally just take a scoop into my bag or bucket of wheat and dump it straight into the grinder. But recently I've been noticing a very fine, black powder residue in the feed funnel of my grinder. It's very fine dust and has a lot of static cling and I'll brush it out of the feed funnel but it was bothering me where it was coming from.
This morning, instead of dumping my scoop of wheat into the grinder - this time I dumped it into my #40 mesh sifter and gave the wheat berries a good shaking and I couldn't believe the amount of black dust (dirt?) that came off the wheat berries. The thought that I've been mixing that stuff up in my bread dough all these years made me cringe.
Maybe it's just this particular batch of wheat, I don't know ... but I will be sifting my wheat berries from now on before I grind them.
UPDATE --- YIKES! I just sifted some to take these pictures and zoomed in and they are tiny bugs! What are these? What can I do to prevent these? I read that I can freeze the wheat to kill them but I have about 100 lbs so it'd take me a few weeks to cycle all of it thru the freezer. Suggestions welcome.
Weevils. Freezing. Then sieve to separate if you don't want the extra protein. ;-)
I know this isn’t going to help but I buy my grain in the winter where I can leave it in the shed for a week at temperatures that are -20 to -30 C. I hate bugs in the house and your pictures just made me cringe! You are going to have to figure out some way of freezing it in portions if you want to keep it. Personally, I would toss it and take the pocketbook hit.
Well it doesn't get very cold where I live - and when it does cool down, my garage is no colder than my kitchen because I don't heat the house in winter.
No worries about the pocketbook hit - but I don't know where I'd get more wheat berries at the moment. I haven't tried (yet) but everything else has been hoarded so I suspect wheat has too.
Well since I first posted, I have been going thru all my wheat and sifting out the mites and putting the wheat berries into individual bags in the freezer.
I don't believe these are weevils --- weevils that I'm familiar with are much larger. That photo is extremely enlarged. Each mite is about the size of a particle of flour and sift right thru a fine mesh. So no way to sift them out of flour - but easy to sift them out of whole wheat berries.
I'm going to study up on them though - my daughter tells me once they are in your house they infest everything. So I have to find out what I can do to kill them off.
Meanwhile I have all my wheat berries in separate, smaller bags in the freezer.
I had just made a thread the other day about cleaning the stones in my grinder because they were all gummed up. Now I know what they were gummed up with --- BUGS! Yuck!
Are you experimenting with little jars of them as to what really does kill them?
Did they get killed in the mill?
Does freezing kill them or just slow them down?
Have they drilled little holes into the wheat and hollowed the berries?
I didn't save the bugs to test on them. But I'm sure there are still some on the wheat that is now in the freezer. I'll go thru the wheat again when it comes out of the freezer.
They haven't drilled holes in the wheat - the wheat berries themselves still seem just fine. I don't know how long they've been alive ... probably only a few months.
The wheat berries sprout and grow wheat grass (I've been planting some for my cat to chew on). Here are pictures of the wheat berries zoomed in really close (they look like loaves of bread) and then some cracked open berries. I don't see anything wrong with them and the bread has been delicious and same great texture as always.
I don't know what the background is in the 2 photos in the original post, so I can only guess as to the size.
if you can, photograph some next to the wheat berries, and send it to your county's ag extension agent, and maybe they'll give you an exact name and procedure to get rid of them.
Here is what I've seen, but I suppose your critters are smaller.
https://badpests.com/media/uploads/2018/10/wheat-weevils.jpg
Here is a picture of adults and babies (and ?? I don't know what - egg clusters? poop?) next to a couple of wheat berries.
Those don't have the snorkel nose, so they are likely not weevils.
Must be mites. Looks like various ages/stages too.
This is the picture you want to send to your county ext agent, and your supplier, and get a recomendation of what to do.
The containers the wheat was in likely need cleaned and disinfected to remove/kill any eggs and larvae.
Fig 31 has long antennae, too big a head, and differently placed legs than your sample.
Andy, Honeyville has good pricng on wheat and great shipping fees.
https://shop.honeyville.com/hard-red-wheat.html
https://shop.honeyville.com/hard-white-wheat.html
Are you storing your berries in containers that are sealed with rubber o-rings.
Maybe you could sow some of those berries and try harvesting a little of your own home grown wheat.
Hard Spring Wheat?
I grew up just a few miles from Honeyville. I generally load my car with 50lb bags of Wheat Montana whenever I visit my sister in Bozeman. But Central Milling is just an hour away from me here in California - I've sent an email to them to see how their stocks are.
Are you sure that Honeyville is selling bulk wheat? My daughter in law tried to buy 200lbs of wheat in Utah just a few weeks ago and it has all been hoarded already. My sister in Montana said it was 10lb limit per customer (at the grocery stores - not sure about at Wheat Montana headquarters).
Anyway ... I plan to keep baking bread with my bug infested wheat :) I've got enough to last me a few months yet and it'll taste even better now that I'm screening off the bugs before I grind - haha.
Since I posted the links ablove they are now out of HRW. HWW is still available in 50 pound bags
So I hate to be the bearer of bad news but this is unavoidable with grain of pretty much any type that has not been fumigated. And even then you mat not find live, but definitely dead specimens or evidence thereof if you sample a large enough quantity. I mean we love to eat this stuff, the bugs are no different. Pretty much all grain specifications and standards have allowances for foreign matter including insects.
If you are buying non fumigated grain (hopefully you are, not stuff you want to be eating IMO) then freezing your grain or flour that will be stored for any duration >6mo should be common practice.
I work for a large organic food ingredients company and can advise this is common practice as both a preventive measure and a remedy for live infestation. It may seem gross to us, but here’s a fun fact: more of the worlds population customarily eats insects for food at least sometimes than those of us who do not. It’s all cultural.
Oh and as for them potentially infesting your whole house, not likely unless your house is a grain silo. Post harvest insects are very particular about their food. That said, definitely make sure your grain is stored in rigid containers that are air tight. No plastic bags, many pests can bore/chew through them easily.
IMG_1932.PNG
https://dontwastethecrumbs.com/flour-bugs/
https://www.holderspestsolutions.com/pest-library/beetles/red-flour-beetle/
I have had lot of jars of flour since 2017and any other dry stuff that bugs infest and they do not have any bugs because they are in glass jars with metal lids. Some one on youtube showed how to vacuum pack with the food saver the gallon jars and it really works. I'm kinda, sorta, happy to live where it gets below zero in January so I put all my jars on the porch for 3 weeks to kill any bugs then, in the house for for 3 weeks then out on the porch for another three weeks so if there are any eggs to hatch it would kill them also. I have been buying wheat berries now and will do the same with them. I came on this site because I had ordered wheat berries from a place out west and there is a lot of wheat dust, which I did not notice when I ordered wheat berries from the LDS. I was wondering if this wheat was older.
Kathan, you may find something useful in this link.
http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/64081/tip-bugs-whole-grains