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Comment by cableshaft | Hacker News Reader

Yeah I did the pantry thing after March 2020 (in the basement, the kitchen doesn't have a proper pantry) and wasn't careful enough about protecting it. It was fine for a year, but this winter we got mice in the house and now we have to toss what wasn't in cans or plastic containers already.

We set some live traps and I've caught and released (several miles away) four mice already.

Still a good idea, we just can't have anything mice could possibly get into next time.

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Amazon sells galvanized steel garbage cans of various sizes. They have a lid that naturally seals tightly. They're varmint proof for anything up to a bear. Perfect for mouse-proofing your food.

My experience with mice is that they travel in 6 packs. If you catch one, there are probably 5 more.

One of my enduring memories was in my school years visiting a friend whose family had recently moved to Australia from Asia. At the end of their kitchen bench, they had a food-grade plastic bin larger than the stereotypical Oscar-the-grouch trash can, full of rice. We buy rice in 5-10kg bags but maybe I should be trying to find larger.

Should you proceed with your plan, be sure to check the bin for the presence of tiny insects every now and then. One of the problems with storing rice in quantity is the profusion of insects (bugs, moth larvae, et cetera) that like to make the rice bin their home.

We deep freeze anything of that nature for a month or so before drying off to root cellar. There's a small brown moth that hitches in on dog kibble, bird seed, brown rice, and more that can establish a reproductive cycle most places with organics. So hard to get rid of.

I would advice against it, unless you want to be visited by rice weevils

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice_weevil

Small packs of rice are the way to go imo.

Flour beetles can chew their way through plastic bags. I don't know if rice weevils can too, but I wouldn't be surprised.

Better use a metal trash can, and have a reliable way to seal the lid, if you don't want to germinate bugs in it.

49ers bought coffee, sugar, and flour in 50-100 lb bags, and lard in multi-gallon cans. Those were the important supplies.

I have one and it's working perfectly. I use it to store bags of bird seed in my shed, where there are most definitely mice present. So far this winter there's been no sign of them getting in and having a feast.

The mice aren't getting in unless they figure out how to use an angle grinder :-)

The city supplies me with a garbage toter (that fits their garbage truck mechanism). The squirrels bore a hole through it and raid it constantly. Replace the toter, and another hole in it a day or two later. I'd open the lid to throw in more trash and they'd hide inside, but I could usually see their twitching whiskers. I didn't really mind it so much, until the raccoons started in on the fun and would strew the garbage all over the driveway. I finally resorted to storing the garbage in a steel can, and dump it in the toter only on trash pickup day.

Not sourced from Amazon, but I keep animal feed in one, only way to keep mice out of it.

We use a lot of tubs with seals because panty moths came in woth the bird food a couple of years ago. I HATE pantry moths.

I bought a vacuum sealer, that was the only way to get rid of them.

I think this is one of the best mouse traps:

https://www.automatictrap.com/

Electric traps work too, but are a pain to clean.

Snap tracks are effective, but when I had both mice and rats I found that a mouse trap could break a rats leg but let it walk away, and a mouse could eat from a rat trap without triggering it. Neither of those were good outcomes.

On those snap traps, you can bend the wire that holds back the spring downward in slight increments until the trap is so sensitive you can almost set off by blowing on it. This is the only way I was able to clear an infestation of juvenile mice years ago. Before this modification, the small mice were eating the bait without triggering the traps.

Did you bait them with peanut butter? That has always worked for me.

I've also heard of people gluing an almond to the trap. The mouse will tug on it and snap!goodbye.

I set mine with grapes, cut in half, with the grape skin in the trigger. The grape skin seems to be strong enough to prevent removal without triggering.

I use bread, or nothing. I've caught a lot of mice in unbaited traps. Mice are super curious creatures, and if the trap is in their path they often poke at it out of curiosity.

Bread works great; I moisten it and smoosh it into the trap platform where it hardens and must be chewed to consume it. I avoid oily and stick stuff because I reuse my traps. No sense throwing out perfectly good traps IMO.

I hate killing mice BTW. I have a couple of giant mice in my back yard who have completely annihilated the infestation of earwigs that plagued us for years. I see those mice out there nearly every day, and I tell them thank you, and I beg them not to enter my house. So far they seem to be listening.

I have no issues with mice as long as they are not in my house. But I don't mind killing them, I dump the corpse outside and it's always gone in less than a day, so some other critter is getting a meal.

There's also the flip bucket traps which are pretty good. If you want to keep them alive you can otherwise you can put some water in it.

House mice and rodents that have lived in buildings for their entire lives will have a slim chance of surviving outdoors. If possible, relocate mice to an outbuilding like a shed or garage.

https://www.humanesociety.org/resources/what-do-about-wild-m...

Mice carry disease, and the hantavirus is extremely deadly.

I know, I've had it.

>50% fatality by some counts.

As mice in my area have it, I cannot in good conscience do anything but kill mice I catch. The risks are too high.

FWIW, hantavirus is spread via mouse urine, not by the mice themselves, so the most important way to avoid it is to sanitize places where mice have peed.

Also droppings, apparently. You're not supposed to vaccuum because it could stir up dust from the droppings. I've just been reading up on it from the CDC:

https://www.cdc.gov/hantavirus/pdf/HantavirusBrochure-508.pd...

Oh man, I looked up hantavirus, scary stuff. Sorry you had to go through that.

Thankfully there's only been 4 known cases in my state since at least as far back as 1996, but still.

Now I'm starting to rethink the live traps. Also I'm going to be extra careful in the basement, and might throw out more stuff than I was going to before. Great.

Also not going to do what I was planning to do and clean everything up slowly over weeks, even while recently capturing the mice.

For the last 20 hours or so, during the worst, I stayed awake and coughed up golfball sized chunks of phlegm every 15 minutes or so.

Apparently, many deaths occur by people literally drowning in their own phlegm. Had I not stayed awake, had I gone to sleep, I suspect it would have built up and I'd have woken choking, without time to cough up the accumulation before death.

I had a large set of lungs, and good stamina fortunately.

One of my biggest fears is COVID (which is in mice now) mixing genes with this.

it’s advertised as a kibble container but we all know it holds 25 pounds of flour juuust fine. (and we use it quickly enough, which is kind of shocking but also, pie crust is easy!)

pie crust is easy

So is pizza dough!

I make it about once a week, and every time I'm reminded of my younger generation boss who didn't know that pizza dough is just flour, water, salt, and yeast. She though it was some kind of magic plastic or something and refused to eat pizza because of it.

People really are getting too far away from their food sources.

Wha? How?! Plastic?? That's bizarre.

People think american cheese is literal plastic

Sure, but that’s understandable since American cheese is closer to literal plastic than literal cheese.

Flour is sugar, sugar is unhealthy!

>She though it was some kind of magic plastic

This is a first for me.

Pizza dough is one of those things I make regularly, and boy does it freeze well. Make one batch, then eat it over a few weeks. Hell, I'd do daily, but my scale would never forgive me for that.

> She though it was some kind of magic plastic

If all she's had is "dollar slice" pizza, I can see how she came to that conclusion.

Really? I can't. Why would pizza dough be made of plastic when it appears so bread-like? It's called dough.

The most important thing to know about making pizza dough, or really any bread dough, is you want stir in water just enough to get it all wet, and then let it soak for at least 40 minutes before you work it. Second is, refrigerate for at least a day if you care about flavor.

Mice can get into a lot of plastic containers, can't they?

They will chew through plastic.

Easily. They can chew their way into plastic jars and even five gallon buckets if given the time.

Had a mice infestation myself a few years ago. Glue traps worked great. Also, consider getting a cat.

Def seal all your food with plastic or glass containers.

Good on you for the live traps! I've found that the green plastic live traps on homedepot.com work well (though quite annoying to clean).

Since my last winter with mice I went and got a ton of big thick plastic containers of all shapes and sizes. Helps organize, and keeps out other pests like moths, weevils, ants.

Need a cat! It is truly interesting how valuable they are, when you need them.

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