The Biscuit beetle, Stegobium paniceum, is a common household and storage pest. It was given the Latin name paniceum (from the word panis) because it feeds on bread – but it consumes practically everything edible, and many things inedible, to humans.
It has been recorded from vases in the tomb of Tut Ankh-Amen (1350BC), and was a common occupier of ‘hardtack’, the dense, dry biscuit eaten by sailors, soldiers and explorers for centuries. Stegobium has been reported feeding on farinaceous foods of all kinds, as well as meat, spices, dried vegetable matter, and even infesting poisonous materials like belladonna and strychnine. It has been known to bore through an entire shelf of books and to perforate tin foil and even sheet lead! In the home, it is a common inhabitant of old birds’ nests in roof spaces, and then migrate down into living quarters.
The female lay about 100 eggs in a food source. The first-stage larva actively explores its surroundings, even squeezing through small crevices in food packaging. The larva moults four times over a four- or five-month period before being fully grown: it then makes a cocoon of food particles cemented together with a secretion from its mouth and enters the pupal stage. Two to three weeks later, the adult form chews its way out of the cocoon.
