Moths like darkness and quiet. They need protein for food and grease and dirt to get all the minerals and salts they can't get from the wool. The adult moths find their food sources by zeroing in on the sulphur bond found in nearly all proteins. To combat moths successfully, you need to deprive them of different things.
1) You can protect protein fibers by masking the sulphur bond. This is what cedar-lined spaces, lavender sachets, or washes such as Eucalan do. 2) You can deprive the moth larvae of part of their food source by cleaning all fibers before storage. 3) You can kill both adults and their eggs by subjecting the fiber to long-term, high (for them) heat or several cycles of extreme cold--putting a suspect fleece in a plastic trash bag, then putting it in the trunk of your car for several really hot days seems to do the trick, as does freezing the fiber for 24 hours, removing it for 24 hours, and repeating the freeze-thaw cycle at least 3 times. 4) You can kill infestations with chemicals (moth balls, NoMoths, etc.), but the infested fiber must be stored in an airtight container with the chemicals for them to be effective. The best tool is prevention. You didn't say how many sheep/fleeces you're storing, but if it's a lot (100+), you might look into compacting them for storage. I attended a fleece evaluation class taught by Judith MacKenzie McCuin recently; she and her husband are currently managing a flock of approximately 450 Shetlands, and she described how they store the clip. Basically, she has something similar to a commercial trash compactor, and she packs the skirted and bundled fleeces into the compactor, then creates 500 lb. "bricks" of fleece. Once compacted, the fleece bricks can be stored outside on pallets with just a tarp over them. The bricks are hard enough that outside weather conditions and insects only penetrate the outer 1/4" of the brick. If you're not dealing with hundreds of fleeces, you can do the same thing by lining 5-gal. buckets with a trash bag, then packing the fleece(s) in as tightly as possible (Judith suggested stomping on them, the way you do when you want to add more clippings to the yard waste can), then putting on the lid and sealing it tight. In my own case, I usually have less than 10 fleeces at any given time and I have a cedar-lined closet in my studio, so I just make sure that everything is very clean before going into the plastic bins in the closet; if the fiber is something extra-special (e.g. cashmere), I also bag it in a ZipLoc. HTH, Dawn Jacobson http://dtjacobson.blogspot.com/ Ravelryid: dtjacobson --- In [email protected], Jane Woodhouse <jan...@...> wrote: > > I am trying to stay one step ahead of the moths but its not easy!!. <snip> > Any ideas. I have a lot of wool and mohair around here and have to > find a good way to store. > > Jane >
