Category Archives: General Stuff

At first I didn’t recognize it because it was so dark, and the usual grey wrinkled bars were barely perceptible. But under a microscope it has the distinctive brown ocellus, vaguely purpled, strongly edged by golden coppery arcs, and the dark tornus streak wrapped about its inner margin.

All the books say Cydia pomonella is double-brooded, flying end of May to October, so 24 December seems a tad late.

Admittedly my kitchen is not very seasonal, but I’m still left wondering what’s going on. I have only one suggestion.

Although we’ve been buying apples all month, the books also claim that codling moth is no longer a shop species, because of all the pesticides; instead it has become a garden moth, living in the random garden apple trees planted across the nation. We have one, and our apples are riddled with the insect every year.

All our home-grown apples are used up now, but what if a caterpillar crawled out of the infested fruit when I was storing it in the biscuit-and-cat-food section of the cupboard under the sink? The moth’s larva usually over-winters in the leaf litter, having gnawed its way out of the windfall in September. Perhaps it had been waiting for spring, tucked up behind a twist of plumbing. But it somehow got confused by the cooking heat and pupated early.

Does this seem reasonable?

The Museum of London, today, with 120 seven-year-olds to study Roman Britain.

There was a comb. Just the one. But it didn’t look as if it would get out many head-lice. Even in pristine, non-broken condition the teeth were too widely spaced.

They were useless, them Romans. Really lousy.

The latest issue of BBC Wildlife dropped through the letterbox this morning, and I’m rather pleased to note that it has a review of ‘Mosquito’ in it.
It’s only short but: “erudite social history”, “infectious enthusiasm”, “a tapestry of cultural references”. I’d like to infer that Dr Gates liked it.

It’s the cigarette beetle, Lasioderma serricorne.

I’ve been doing lots of research into household pests, for the new book on House guests, house pests, so I was excited to discover I’d found another of them myself. OK ‘excited’ might be exaggerating a bit, but there is definitely a sense of satisfied intellectual rigour and achievement on identifying a pale brown 1.75-mm-long beetle that I’ve never seen before.  Working at the microscope through some tiny specimens I’d collected over the year, I came across two specimens that had flown in, attracted to a moth light I’d run, just outside the kitchen door on 28 June 2012.

I should add, for the benefit of any North American readers perplexed by my title, that ‘fag’ is a quaint old British expression for cigarette; this, then, is the cigarette beetle, Lasioderma serricorne.

It supposedly gets its name for its habit of infesting tobacco, whether dried leaves, stored bales, cigars, and especially cigarettes. Related to the domestic woodworm beetle, Anobium punctatum, it will actually feed in a wide range of products including spices, beans, cereals, seeds and cocoa.

Being dull brown, I can only assume that in the days of pipes, cigars and chewing tobacco, this tiny beetle often went unnoticed by the smoker or chewer, much as another close relative the biscuit beetle, Stegobium paniceum, is still overlooked in the kitchen cupboard, unless the occasional struggling insect floats to the surface of the milk poured over infested breakfast cereal. But when  cigarettes started to gain serious popularity in the 1940s, the beetles’ neat round holes in the neat, clean, delicate, white, paper casings started to cause more than mild consternation.

It was during this period that a previously more or less ignored minor pest of such mundane items as ginger and liquorice suddenly acquired its common name. Thankfully, in an era before daft tabloid headlines and media inanity, it was never called the fag-bug.

On my recent visit to Oxford, I spent a little time in the Museum of the History of Science, in Broad Street. And amongst all the ancient brass astrolabes, microscopes and alchemical glassware, I was pleased to see a Gunter chain.

My first job after university was working as a chainman on the construction of the Cuilfail Tunnel in Lewes. In an era before steel tape measures, laser-sighting triangulation and GPS, it was the chainman’s job to maintain and haul about the 22 yards of interlinked ironmongery of the Gunter chain. I’d never seen one before, although I had found some pictures in the historical section of one of the surveying basics books lying around in the engineers’ decrepit Portakabin on site.

By the late 1970s a modern chainman’s role involved carting about sighting poles, tripods and levels and setting up theodolites. My biology skills were not needed, but my maths was occasionally put to use in triangulating, or surveying to see if any of the houses above the tunnel had started to subside. They hadn’t.

My lasting memories of the tunnel are the mud, the Portakabin mice, a belligerently fascist South African engineer and the deathwatch beetle which landed on the collar of the site foreman one sunny autumn afternoon.