I had an attack of them once, presumably in my dried statice. You could try my approach, if you don't want to spray poison in your house. First, check EVERYTHING to make sure of where their webby nests are. Get rid of EVERYTHING they're in, and don't just put it in a wastebasket in the house, put it in the trash outside, preferably in a closed heavy ziplock bag. Make sure all your kitchen stuff that might attract them is sealed inside plastic or glass containers, or they'll get into that. If at all possible, seal all your dried flowers into plastic bags also - because if you don't, you just can't get rid of these guys except by poison, and do you want to spray poison in your house? If you don't seal up your flowers, you might have to hang up a LOT of mothballs. Figure out how much those flowers are worth to you and how much the mothballs would cost, to see if that approach is worthwhile.

Once I threw out the source group of statice and sealed all the rest up, the moths just died off on their own.

If that all seems like too much work, you could try just getting rid of the rose petals and see if they attack anything else, or just die off. They don't like ALL dried flowers - but I can tell you they do like statice.

Jeanne

At home improvement stores you can usually find pheremone traps that you can use to monitor the moths. They won't eradicate a population but can tell you if you've gotten rid of them need to take further action. If you want to keep things that don't have webby nests but that might have eggs, you can try freezing them (about a week) or microwaving them, then sealing them up.

It's a sickening feeling to open a container and see your prized blooms ruined by the meal moths. They especially seem to love peonies, roses, and hollyhocks. There's a product called 'Moth Guard' that gets rid of them. One strip covers 1,000 cubic ft.of space for 4 mos.
The Flower Depot carries them and has some good info on the site-www.tfdepot.com . I've also seen them for less at Tractor Supply Co. stores, but I don't know if you have one in your area. I've been able to salvage some infected blooms by freezing or sealing them in a bag with one of the 'Moth Guard' strips. Keeping them sealed in cardboard boxes or plastic storage totes is the best way to prevent infestation.

Neil and sylky00 - thank you all for the info - I am going to get the strips and phermone traps - also my husband has been vacuming the live ones up with the shop vac - but more keep reappearing - if only cut flowers would multiply as fast as these moths

Jeanne - I did throw the rose petals in the outside trash - all that work drying them - I had them in paper bags so they would stay dry and not mildew - guess I will have to start putting everything in plastic bags - I haven't found anything else they are in since the rose petals - they really are sneaky little things.

my lavender buds are in plastic but my bunches are in boxes - so far they haven't gotten in them. I just got an order of some other drieds though - I think I will store them in the garage till I get rid of all these moths.

thanks again.

Linda