Scopical

Ancient grain borer reveals biblical pest control: study

An Israeli academic team says it has resolved the Biblical riddle of how Joseph the Dreamer preserved Egypt's vast, but unsealed grain stores against invading pests during the seven year drought and saved the country's inhabitants from mass starvation.

The secret lies in the burnt corpse of a 3,500 year old beetle found in a grain of wheat claim researchers (Kislev, Simhoni and Melamed) from the laboratory for archaeological botany in the Life Sciences Department at Bar Ilan University, Haaretz reported on Monday.

The beetle belongs to the highly destructive Rhyzopetha dominica species, commonly known as the Lesser Grain Borer, which invades wheat and barley stored in silos after it has been harvested in the field.

Each female Lesser Grain Borer lays between 300 and 500 eggs a month giving birth to thousands of insect larvae a year which bore into wheat or barley. The pest can eat up a silo within a very short time.

The insect originated in India where its larvae had once bored into trees. But several thousand years ago at the time of Joseph when the insect began its westward migration to Egypt and the Middle East, it changed its taste to wheat and barley.

The beetle studied by the Bar Ilan University team was discovered at an excavated granary dating to the Middle Bronze Age II B at Beit She'an in the Upper Jordan Valley which roughly corresponded to the time of Joseph whom Pharaoh appointed viceroy and put in charge of Egypt's entire grain storages.

Granary pests had been previously studied at other archaeological sites in Israel along the shores of the Sea of Galilee where large numbers of such pests had been found.

Joseph knew of the Lesser Grain Borer and the beetle's amazing reproductive ability, the team inferred from a biblical description in Genesis 41:48-49. To reduce its migration he isolated the grain harvested in each locality and prevented batches being transferred from one city and community to another.

Sand was also added to the stored grain as a simple method of pest control known and practiced in ancient Egypt, the researchers say.

Sand crystals absorb moisture in the granary and prevent the grain from rotting and decaying. But they scratch away at the beetle's hard body shell causing it to dry up and die.

Various African tribes to this day still use this biological pesticide as means of control and extermination.