I have some small black bugs on my kitchen counter that seem to be attracted to oil and sweets, as well as dry ingredients. They are about the size of a grain of coffee, and they have a bit of a hardened shell. They don't seem to fly, just crawl. Someone suggested using bay leaves, but this has done nothing at all to get rid of them. What can I do? They are driving me crazy! Thank you for any assistance you can give me.

This pantry and stored food pests resource (http://www.extension.umn.edu/distribution/nutrition/dj1000.html), provided by the University of Minnesota Cooperative Extension, is very extensive, and even provides diagrams of the possible culprit.

Please give us additional bug description, if this resource does not help.

Sounds like they could be Flour Beetles. Do a search on them and you'll probably see many ways to get rid of them. The most common thing is to remove their food source.

You can actually bring these tiny bugs home inside boxes of pasta and other type starchy foods. There are many times when I don't even open a box of say spaghetti strings and the little bugs are happily running around inside the box. They lay their eggs and actually feed off the package's contents until you let them loose inside your kitchen by opening up the box and not immediately using all the contents of the noodle box. I always repackage my pasta into a tin can or put inside a gallon baggie to keep any bugs already running around my kitchen from getting any free snacks. Those hard shell guys are the worst. Harmless though even if ingested (which I did once) and I was fine.

Can't tell you how many boxes of spaghetti strings or elbow macaronis I've found these bugs in. I used to just throw the entire box out in the junk. Now I just cook them up and give the noodles to my coonies, skunks or possums that I feed (they don't know the difference and just gobble them down).