Top Crop Manager: Managing insects in grain storage

It doesn’t take long for insects to multiply and thrive within stored grain. Even with a single pair of insects – a male and female – the population can explode to more than one million after four months under the right conditions. One adult female can lay eggs continuously and those larvae become adults in less than one month at optimum conditions and lay their own eggs. The result is overlapping generations of insects multiplying within a storage bin – feeding on grain, causing spoilage and other serious issues.

While it seems plausible the Canadian Prairie winters would solve the insect problem, the cold is not as effective as one might think. Researchers at the University of Manitoba’s Department of Biosystems Engineering – led by Fuji Jian, associate professor at the university – have been looking into what temperatures are needed to keep insect populations under control, how quickly they reproduce and how these insects move and behave within stored grain.