Last Christmas, my ds was adamant that we needed to have nuts in the shell. Somehow, it wouldn’t be Christmas without them. So I got a bag and bought a new nutcracker (because the old one was broken by the same ds; I can’t remember what he was trying to do with it……). Now it turned out that the idea of having nuts in the shell was more fun than actually cracking the darned things (even though we are all keen on eating nuts). So the mesh bag was still more or less full when ds dug it out and decided that now, in the middle of April, would be a good time to finish off those Christmas nuts.
He decided to start with walnuts. And that’s how we learned about a common pest in walnuts, namely the Walnut Husk Fly. We didn’t have the fly though. We had the maggots. About 8 or 9 mm long, white wiggly things. It only took about 30 seconds on the web to identify them.
And very scientifically, ds and R got a bowl and started cracking all the walnuts to a chorus of ‘oh bummer, this one is ok to eat. Oh look, this one has a maggot!’ They got about 15 of the things. Ick. I’m just glad that they never made it out of the shells while in my cupboard (oh you can bet I checked, and vacuumed & wiped…..) We figure that in nature, the walnuts would fall to the ground and the moisture would soften the shell and allow the maggot to escape to become a fly. It was interesting to see that there was only 1 maggot per walnut. Maybe there had been some cannibalization going on at an earlier phase of development?
They were going to let them free outside until I reminded them that we have toads living with us. So the toads had a late Christmas treat.
And I’m off walnuts for a while.
You really want to see a Walnut Husk maggot?
OK - and here's the fly and more information than you ever wanted about it.
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