SKULKERS IN DRY FOOD MATERIALS 443 

 IMPORTS WITH FLOUR 



Grain escapes the attacks of some of the pests only to 

 be devoured in its more specialized forms as flour or biscuits. 

 The American Meal Worm, the hard-skinned waxy-looking 

 grub of a brownish, half-inch long Beetle, Tenebrio obscurus, 

 is now almost as common in our flour and meal, in stables, 

 stores and pantries, as its relative, the original European 

 Meal Worm ( Tenebrio molitor] ; and both species have been 

 dispersed throughout the world by the traffic in food stuffs. 

 A similar fate has befallen the Meal Snout Moth (Pyralis 

 farinalis], owing to the success with which its caterpillars 

 conceal themselves in stored cereals, flour or biscuits. But 

 the worst of the introduced flour pests is another Pyralid, the 

 Mediterranean Flour Moth (Ephestia kiihniella], of pale 

 leaden-grey colour with wing expanse less than an inch 

 across, for this in the course of some fifty years has established 

 posts throughout the world. First recorded in a flour-mill 

 in Central Europe in 1877, it appeared in England ten years 

 later, and since 1888 has sporadically caused damage there 

 and in Scotland as far north as Aberdeen. Now, it is well 

 known throughout Europe, and in the New World, where 

 it appeared in 1889, it has spread from Canada to Chili. 

 The damage caused by the lumping of flour on account of 

 the silken galleries woven in it by the caterpillars is reckoned 

 at many thousands of pounds a year. Destruction of a 

 similar kind is caused by the European Grain or Wolf 

 Moth (Tinea grane lla\ which has become established in the 

 New World. 



The presence of so many well-fed inhabitants of grain 

 and flour has led to the introduction of animal types different 

 from themselves, which find in them an easy and abundant 

 food supply. Thus the carnivorous Grain Mite, Pediculoides 

 ventricosus, has been carried with the soft larvae it devours 

 to many a new country, to the annoyance of mankind, for 

 the mite readily transfers its attention to the human body 

 and gives rise to an irritable skin eruption known as grain- 

 itch. So troublesome is the red rash due to the mite attacks, 

 that, when in 1913, several cargoes of grub-infested cotton- 

 seed arrived in London from Alexandria in Egypt, it was 

 found necessary to raise by 50 per cent, the wages of the 



