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The terrible story of the carpet beetles



We recently discovered that we had an infestation of carpet beetles. Loads of them. It was horrific. We found a couple of individual holes in things, they looked like this:



Like someone had snipped a single thread. And then Leon started looking for the nest, and discovered it. What happened was, when we moved in three years ago Leon popped his old backpacking backpack under the bed. We usually take our hiking packs away with us, because we make hiking part of every trip these days. The cats had been sleeping on it, and it was covered in cat hair. It looks like the carpet beetle babies were living off those and a sheep skin we had under there. Leon spent a lot of time cleaning it out and vacuuming. We inspected all our knitwear and the only thing that was chewed up was a vest that Leon doesn't really wear. I wanted to re-use the wool, but when I tried to pull it out, I could not make it unravel. it's not felted or anything, it just wont go. Really odd.

Anyway, it looks like we avoided a very bad thing, and I thank Leon for his hard work getting the situation sorted. 


 

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