Yay - Raffy came out. I was getting quite worried about him as hadn't seen him for two nights and he didn't seem to have taken much, if any, food. He did eat his veg though. Then tonight he popped out and looked back to normal and wanted to come out, and had his long roam round the living room. The tricky bit is getting him back upstairs in a tube as it's a longer time in the tube and he keeps nosing round my hand at either end.
It has been a fraught and not so pleasant week. I relaxed a bit after seeing no moths one night. Then found three above Molly's cage and then today found three in the spare bedroom upstairs where I've just moved Raffy! Two were dead, one was alive. I was about to move Molly up to that room too, in a temporary cage but had to stop and have a rethink.
It's possible the moths flew upstairs and went into Raffy's room but unlikely as there weren't any in the hall or bathroom. And there was one in our bedroom last night (which presumably came from Raffy's room too). Everything in Raffy's temporary cage is new and clean and a new bag of food from the freezer. I'm beginning to think it's the bedding. I used the rest of the bag of Kaytee in Raffy's new temporary set up. The same bag of Kaytee I used to top up Molly's fitch when setting up her cage. It came from Amazon. I had just ordered three more on sale in case the Fitch didn't get here on time to re-set up Raffy's original cage. (Which it has got here thankfully_. I'm sending the Kaytee straight back to Amazon.
Someone else suggested it might be the bedding. And told me Fitch had been known to have bugs! I've never had them from Fitch before and I thought that was unlikely, but I couldn't work out how both cages could have got moths from food when they have different hamster mixes and Molly's is kept in a different room. So the Kaytee is the common denominator. I used some of it to top up Raffy's fitch recently.
I put everything on hold and instead set up Molly's temporary cage, with the new Fitch, in the "dining room" (it's actually more of a "everything that doesn't fit anywhere else" room at the moment). I hope the Fitch is ok.
I know people use Kaytee all the time and don't have any issues but the last time I used it about 3 years ago I had a moth outbreak in a newly set up cage too! And had the same dilemma then trying to work out what caused it as everything had been frozen. Rainbow pointed out that some reviews on Amazon said they had bugs in Kaytee but only when they bought it from Amazon. So it might be storage as opposed to Kaytee C&C itself.
I ran out of time to get Molly's cage emptied out so another night of slight insomnia wondering where the moths are!
I now have one cage in bits in the bath, two cages set up for the hamsters in separate rooms and Molly's original cage, still in the living room. That will be to clear out tomorrow. I'm running out of space! I still haven't cleaned all the contents of Pip's old cage. Raffy's contents and cage are still to do, then Molly's. I've had a lot of help from OH so everything took longer rather than just doing it myself. I can't do the bending to disinfect the things in the bath so it'll take two of us and quite a long time.
I suppose I might just get on top of it all by Christmas. The moths don't seem to be pantry moths. They look like the normal brown house moths - ie the ones that like eating clothes and carpets
and praying I don't get an invasion it sounds horrendous I think I would get paranoid looking for newly hatched eggs and keep squashing them years ago I lost some wool sweaters stored in the loft for the summer I now use airtight containers and I stunk the place out with moth balls but don't think you could use them in same room as hamsters they nearly asphixiated us.
