Email this feature to a friend

By Jason Sheftell

It eats like a pig, breeds like a bunny, lives fast and dies young. It worships tobacco and heat. It's cosmopolitan. It's Lasioderma serricorne, better known as the tobacco beetle, and it loves nothing more than to hatch in your humidor and feast on your cigars.

No bigger than a pinhead, the tobacco beetle makes cigar lovers around the world tremble. One generation of its offspring can take a sizable bite out of a manufacturer's tobacco inventory. Or damage a retailer's reputation. Or even invade your humidor at home. But don't panic if, next time you reach for a smoke, you notice a nasty little hole in the wrapper where a beetle tunneled in or out. While Lasioderma serricorne are a fact of life for manufacturers, retailers and consumers alike, they can be controlled.

"Once you see them, that usually means the damage has been done," says Gayle Ridge-O'Connor, an entomology assistant at the New Haven-based Connecticut Agricultural Experimental Station, which has been studying the behavioral patterns of insects for more than 125 years. "But you can kill them and prevent them from coming back."

We'll get to that. First, some lessons. To paraphrase Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese general and philosopher of war, you can't defeat an enemy you don't understand.

Known by entomologists as "cosmopolitan" insects, tobacco beetles are found all over the world, but only in environments where the temperature exceeds 65 degrees Fahrenheit. Adult beetles measure about two to three millimeters long. They have wings and can fly, but live only for an average of two to four weeks. Brownish-red, they have serrated antennae for touching and smelling; these antennae steer them toward the warm habitats where they nest and breed.

Like many other beetles and insects in general, tobacco beetles have a four-stage life cycle--egg, larva, pupa and adult--that lasts about 10 to 12 weeks. The female adult can chew its way through paper or tobacco leaf, and finds in cigars a suitably warm environment to lay its eggs, small white ovals that are too small for the human eye to detect. The eggs, up to 100 per birth cycle, hatch within six to 10 days, giving birth to the larvae. The larvae present the most danger to tobacco.

"The larvae are what eat the tobacco," says Ridge-O'Connor. "They need tobacco or other foods stored in a suitable temperature to grow into the pupa and adult stage."

White, soft and prickly, larvae can be up to four millimeters long. The larval stage is the beetle's longest phase of life, averaging six to 10 weeks. It's followed by a one- to two-week pupal stage, during which a protective cocoon grows around the insect. Finally, more than two months after the eggs have been laid, the tobacco beetle emerges from its cocoon for its brief life as a fully formed adult.

One common myth regarding tobacco beetles is that they live solely off tobacco. Not true. They're equally attracted to other plants and food products stored within their desired temperature range (65 degrees Fahrenheit and warmer). Tobacco beetles infest stored products, both edible and inedible, including spices (such as paprika and coriander), rice, dry pet food, seeds, pharmaceuticals, books, leather, coffee beans, furniture, upholstery, peanuts and yeast.

Continue

 Cigar Aficionado RSS Feed
Copyright ©2008 CigarAficionado.com

All Rights Reserved.
If you're concerned about privacy, click here.