The Beetles are Overrated!

  To support the channel and get access to the online tying sessions, as well as being entered into the giveaways head to https://www.patreon.com/flickingfeathers and sign up

Another old one from Sexy Loops

Normally I don't get particularly stressed about things, but this week got to me a bit. Last Sunday I decided it was time to tidy up the tying room. The most onerous of tasks made all the worse by knowing it would be a a chaotic mass of feather and fur about 37 seconds into the first fly tied after the cleaning. 

As awful as it already sounds, that's not the worst of it! Starting on the job I picked up a chicken wing, or tried to at least, it disintegrated in my hands. That's right, I'm under attack from dermestid beetles.. Panic! 

Now, I store all my tying materials in individual zip lock bagsand store them in separate bins as a precaution. All the bins have camphor pellets and borax scattered inside but that doesn't mean the materials are safe from beetles, moths or some other insecty fuckers. 

So basically every spare minute since has been spent checking, steaming, washing, freezing and microwaving my collection of materials. All while worrying about how long it'd take to replace it all. I suppose the silver lining is that I now actually know everything that I have - hopefully I'll be able to avoid future double buying but that is probably a pipe dream...  have you any idea how hard it is to dry 47 bucktails in a small Japanese apartment? 

There's very little information on-line about dealing with this problem, possibly because moths eating clothing seems to be something that only happened when your granny was young. This is pretty surprising because it is a seemingly common issue. One tip I did get from a Facebook group is to use cedar blocks instead of the camphor so I'll give it try. I'm still not sure how they got in, maybe the wings already had eggs on them, or maybe they crawled in a window.. I'll never know.

I'm doing a second bug bombing once I empty the capes etc from the freezer, then perhaps I'll feel safe.I'd been doing everything right and still got the beetles, I hope you can avoid them but stay vigilant and be ready.