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Without rice there is no paella. And if when you open the package of rice you find a weevil, this tiny bug will have spoiled the main raw material of this popular dish so deeply rooted in the gastronomic culture in Spain.
I have had the opportunity to see the weevil beetle on the leaves of the broad beans in the orchard of the Pedralbes monastery. It’s super quiet. So he allowed me to be close to be able to do this photographic report for La Vanguardia’s Readers’ Photos with some detail: his mouth, his nose, his eyes and his entire face. It’s all a beauty.
According to the Organization of Consumers and Users (OCU), “rice weevils (Sitophilus oryzae) are small insects that measure between 3 and 5 mm, brown in color and have a hard, cylindrical body.” They produce significant economic losses in the rice industry sector.
If we look at their appearance they may even seem cute, like something out of an animated movie, but they are a pest that can attack any type of cereal: wheat, rye, barley, corn and, less frequently, oats. They are phytophagous, that is, they feed on plants.
They are born in the form of larva, known as “blind hens.” They lay the egg inside the grain of rice, so they go unnoticed and hatch in approximately three days. The larva completes its entire life cycle inside the grain, feeding on its nutrients until emerging as an adult beetle, like the one we see in detail in these photographs.
When they transform into this beetle and we find it in the package of rice, it can give us a very unpleasant surprise. And, surely, we will lose the desire to eat paella, although it will surely be alone that day, since it is difficult for weevils to put an end to the popularity of this dish.
