I toured JR's warehouse once. They said that they relied on their trusted suppliers to deliver cigars that were beetle free. They have a freezer that they use on shipments that might be suspect, for example, if they bought out someone else's stock.

Your best bet is to learn to love to freeze.
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i once had a opus perfection x (cedar sleeve) that I kept forever in a single plastic bag....I finally decided to smoke it......when I removed the cedar sleeve.....the cigar looked like swiss cheese.......weird no beetles in bag....maybe they suffocated?
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Incubation is mostly dependent on temperatures. They will incubate and hatch in considerably lower ambient humidity than where you are presently keeping your humidor.
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I'd have to look up the chart again but here is some of the data I found when a Graycliff hatched in my humidor.

1. Most cigar manufacturers have two things they use to control beetles, one is pesticides in the warehouse (fumigants), and the other is freezing after the cigar is rolled.

2. Freezing can actually destroy the beetle eggs and optimally a "deep freeze" such as used to flash freeze fish is recommended.

3. High temperatures (spiru.cgahr.ksu.edu/proj/iwcspp/pdf2/9/6239.pdf) destroy beetle eggs as well and is actually more commonly used in the food industry to control them as it's really not all that hot and grains etc don't mind it at all. At 55 degrees C for roughly an hour all of the eggs are destroyed. With regards to heating cigars though, not very common and I'm guessing it's due to the same thing as fish, e.g. flash freezing fish keeps them fresh and tasty and heating them up, well, cooks them.

4. If the cigars are not fumigated, deep frozen, or heat treated, there is almost a 100% chance that beetle eggs are dormant inside of the cigar and then it's a game of when they hatch.

5. Hatching is mostly temperature dependent because you don't want to have a grain dry and dusty cigar so your stuck with being in an optimal humidity range. The optimal temperature range is 80 degrees F however the range is from 60 degrees F to 110 degrees F for hatching with lower temperatures increasing the time in dormancy. At 80 degrees F incubation time of less then a week to hatching. Even storing cigars at 65 deg F and 65% humidity hatches beetles. You have to store below 60 deg F if you want to prevent them from hatching if the eggs are present.

Well, that is what I remembered and I did browse the internet before posting this reading all sorts of conclusions in University studies as the details, well, ADD kicks in and I just can't read the biology test details.
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I'm doing a salt test on my hygrometer over the last couple of days in the basement. Upstairs it's between 68-70 degrees and downstairs according to the hygrometer sits between 65-66 degrees.

If that temperature spread holds during the summer, the house sits at 80-81 degrees during a couple of weeks in the summer. I'd be near the upper edge of the recommended temperature spread.

That being said I'll probably freeze my cigars, once I get my bloody cooler, time and money, time and money.
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You can also heat the cigars as I said. Think bed bugs and how to kill them which is wrap in plastic, heat up to about 120 degrees F, sit for an hour and they are all dead. A lot of people resist heating cigars since they can burst and crack the wrappers from swelling but I think you can try that as well. Not much forum approaches discuss heating cigars so you'll be on a fringe but then again, 8 years ago freezing cigars was quite a controversy and I would submit many even on this forum are opposed to freezing cigars.

For the most part manufactures have gotten much better and when my Graycliff hatched it was a fairly common problem for Graycliff at the time. I've seen Cohiba's have beetle holes in them as well, the Dominican Cohiba's that is and it was a few years before my Graycliff.
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The freezing process is well understood; there are things you can do to prevent your cigars from dehydrating during freezing, thereby preserving the RH of the cigars.

Your cigars would also require some sort of protection to keep from drying out in the oven -- even for an hour and it's not like you can use your five-finger bags or any poly wrap to protect them. Not to mention a whole lot of other potential problems...

If you are worried about beetles I would stick to using the freezer... Just my :-) (and maybe not even worth that much :-))
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Very interesting information, Dave. It would be very educational to find a write-up from a cigar smoker who used the heat technique. It seems to me, off hand, that the precautions and setup for the heating would be more involved and stringent than freezing. However, knowing alternate methods is always a plus.

Personally, I'd be very worried about damaging the oils in the tobacco and so am unlikely to experiment with this technique. On the other hand, when I smoke a cigar, the temps get above 140*, so I'm pretty sure that the eggs are toast (pun) anyway
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Mark, for some reason I'm thinking volatile oils need about 375*F.
I'm thinking those Sea cans that come in with cigars probably get pretty hot in the Carribean sun, and smokes don't seem to suffer?
Obviously the containers that are buried in the pile on probably don't get all that hot on the ship, but closed up and sitting in the shipyard they have to get pretty damned toasty.
Just thinking is all. :-)
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I most certainly had a beetle infestation. Be sure when you clean your humidor you pay close attension to whatever you use to humidify your sticks. After the first cleaning, I didn't clean out my Boveda Pack and the beetles returned. They love the moisture of the packs. The second cleaning cleared them out for good. I now always freeze any and I mean any cigars I get.
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Yeah, but depending on the origin, those cigars might or might not be cello wrapped, then packed in boxes (some of which are near airtight) or mazos, then possibly shrink wrapped depending on origin, and finally packed into larger boxes. Some NC manufacturers are also known for pumping up the humidity in the cigars prior to transport. I'm not sure if Cuba engages in shipping cigars are higher humidity or not - although I believe their humidity tends to be high, so it kind of happens on it's own.

That's a lot of layers of protection to drying out or damaging the oils that you won't have if those cigars go in the oven. I also question the 120F for 1 hour as I'm sure that lots of cigars see those kind of temps for longer in transit, yet we still hear of beetle outbreaks.

I see putting cigars in the oven as being kind of like baking a cake in your dishwasher. You can do it, but it's really ****ing retarded.
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No infestations ...............but I freeze all of my cigars 72 HRS when I get them before they go in the WineAdor .

Plenty of threads on how to do that.
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Good point, Scott. I was mostly thinking of drying out the cigars but you are quite correct that the referenced technique is much lower in temp that ambient in many cases. In looking at the referenced PDF, I see that the temps are quite low (below 125F). That doesn't seem very high for the possible benefit. Of course, some also use their microwave to reduce the humidity in their cigars (right man's dry box?), if I recall correctly (may have been a post way back at CS).
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I was a bit hasty in some of my numbers as I didn't really think heating cigars would be interesting but in retrospect it is certainly discussion,worthy. So the paper states 50 degrees C (122 deg F) for 12 hours kills all tobacco beetle eggs. This test was confirmed in both plastic and glass dishes in both an oven and an environmental chamber.

I am assuming the environmental chamber is calibrated and has a circulatory fan so is probably more accurate.

I would agree that many cigars are stored or shipped at these temperatures but I also submit that beetle hatching is not very common and most people never experience the horror of well fed beetles living on premium cigars. I guess in general it seems simpler to bake cigars at 122 in a plastic Tupperware container with a damp sponge for 12 hours but I am not sure my home oven even goes that low and work might frown on me using our large environmental chamber to heat my cigars. I also submit that most people will go their whole lives smoking aged cigars and never see a beetle.

In the end I am just happy Universities consider tobacco preservation something worthy to study as so many schools are trying to figure out how to get rid of tobacco.
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Here is another article on how to kill bed bugs which are probably similar nasty critters to kill.

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j...77412846,d.c2E

Conclusion:

Recent research has determined the thermal death points (the temperature at which a bed bug dies) for bed bugs and their eggs. The thermal death point is determined by two things; temperature, and exposure time. Bed bugs ex- posed to 113°F will die if they receive constant exposure to that temperature for 90 minutes or more. However, they will die within 20 minutes if exposed to 118°F. Interestingly, bed bug eggs must be exposed to 118°F for 90 minutes to reach 100% mortality. Note that whole room heat treatments (see below) are based on a thermal death point of 113°F, yet these treatments have been very successful. This is due to the use of powerful fans to create convection currents within the heated room. These currents heat the bed bugs very rapidly, thus increasing their mortality.
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I've had a couple of ones that arrived with holes in them. I just took pics of them for the vendor and they made it right.


Could you imagine this? This pic has been around for a long time:

Image
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does freezing have any effect on the cigar
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I've had two of the little bastards all the way back to '05. They were caught before they could spread the damage. For the past several years I've put all cigars in the deep freezer for min. 72 hours before settling down to rest - this includes all internet, local, and gifts. Never any damage from freezing and no more bugs. However, I do have a buddy that swears he has had a bug after freezing protocols. I can't say either way, but I doubted his claim when he told me. He has a ton of loose sticks and he's no where near as organized as me. Ha!
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I had an infestation years ago when the extent of my inventory was a desktop humidor. A recent addition had a hatch out, and they were all over the place in there. Luckily everything was still smokable, although there were quite a few with holes.
Ever since then, everything I get goes in the freezer for a few days, and I have had no more problems.
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Here is a story of an epic beatle invasion from years ago. It's still being talked about.

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/pi...asion-20140128
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