Archive for June, 2009

You might not be mindful of this, but a secret predator may have its eyes on your cigar box! Numerous lovers of cigars have woken up to discover tobacco beetles (Lasioderma Serricorne) overrunning their precious cigar box! This terrible beetle feasts on your precious cigars and they don’t care if they are drugstore mass-market brands, or exotic beauties.

So, what exactly is a tobacco beetle, and where exactly does it come from? Well, in any country where tobacco is cultivated, the tobacco beetle exists as well, infesting crops and feeding upon the leaves. Tobacco beetles thrive in hot climates, and especially in the warm countries Caribbean countries where much of the world’s tobacco is produced. Tobacco beetles lay larvae that are white, up to 4 mm long and when the larvae hatch, they produce moths that proceed to hungrily eat their way through the tobacco leaves. Unfortuately for most tobacco producing countries, troubles to rid their crops of this dreaded pest by spraying crops with gases and insecticides has proven unhelpful, as the tobacco beetle is very highly resistant.

Cigar enthusiasts have been dismayed when they find out that a tobacco beetle has survived into the finished product, and they find that their cigars have been munched on. Sometimes the presence of the tobacco beetle can be detected through the presence of small puncture-like holes on the wrapper. The holes can make an average cigar resemble a flute.

So, what to do if you find that your cigars have been infested with the dreaded tobacco beetle? Use your microwave! Research has shown that it destroys tobacco beetle larvae. Make sure to dispose of all the infested cigars in your collection before using the microwave, then you can proceed to treat the rest of your cigars. If you want to rid the rest of your cigars of this pest successfully, make sure you microwave them together, not individually. Put the cigars in the microwave for approximately three minutes, then immediately place them into your freezer. After freezing them for 24 hours, remove them and allow them to thaw at room temperature and then once they have thawed completely, you can place them in a humidor. This treatment has been successfully used in treating infested cigars. So before removing a cigar from the humidor to be smoked, examine each one individually and then if it shows no evidence of infestation, it is safe to smoke.