Hi everyone, I guess even with the current stresses the world does go on and we find ourselves in the midst of a silverfish invasion in one of our museum's collection areas.
We brought in a new collection that was in offsite storage and had it frozen at one of our large state institutions for the appropriate time and temperature before having it relocated to one of our more open areas. This is possibly where we helped create the problem. My staff have been very careful at unwrapping only those parts of the collection that are to be processes, catalogued and relocated to proper storage, but what we have found is that the silverfish have moved in regardless, because they are tricky little suckers! Now everything is going through our freezer as well before it goes into storage. Our main concern is that it is a large collection (stored in boxes on a pallet). Unnecessary carboard etc has already been removed. Melbourne has had a lot of rain recently and been unseasonably humid, meaning the little guys that may have been there before have exploded in population. We have upped cleaning and monitoring. We have also asked to our pest contractor, who wasn't very helpful and did not like my idea of perimeter spraying. We are already using proper museum grade traps and silverfish baits. My questions are: * How effective have people found the borax based traps? * Should we push for perimeter spraying? * Has anyone tried diatomaceous earth in a museum setting? I was wondering if it might be worth testing sprinkling food grade earth into the building crevasses.... thoughts? I am particularly interested in diatomaceous earth as it is already used in the grain industry in Australia for grain storage apparently to success. I understand we would need to be careful breathing it in, but I was thinking we could mask up and sprinkle it in for a couple of weeks before vacuuming it out. Has anyone done this? Thanks in advance, Liz Elizabeth Marsden Collections and Archives Manager College of Design & Social Context RMIT University Tel: +61 4 68 618 118 Email: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> [RMIT University] www.rmit.edu.au<http://www.rmit.edu.au/> IMPORTANT NOTE This email and any attachments are confidential and subject to copyright. If you have received this e-mail in error, please immediately notify the sender by reply email and remove and destroy any copies of this email and any attachments. If you are not the intended recipient you are hereby notified that any disclosure, copying, transmission or other use of this email and any attachments is unauthorised and strictly prohibited. Please consider the environment before printing this e-mail -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Museumpests" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/pestlist/ME2PR01MB3412E23F2ED21C2A5B763F61B4F40%40ME2PR01MB3412.ausprd01.prod.outlook.com.
