I am fighting a beetle outbreak as we speak - my first. My cigars (the uninfected ones, anyway) just finished three days in the upright freezer in my garage and have moved to my mini refrigerator upstairs before lying at room temperature for a couple of days. I believe I have isolated the problem. I bought a used humidor and electronic humidifier from a guy off CraigsList. I asked him if he had checked his hygrometer for accuracy and he said that he had. He seemed to know a lot about cigars, humidity and humidors so I left the humidifier at his setting and left it alone. All seemed fine - until I discovered beetle larva damage late last week. Then I checked the humidity in the humidor with my digital hygrometer, which I know to be accurate within about 1%. When the hygrometer on the humidor read 70 percent it was in fact 79 percent - prime beetle farming range.
Here are some pictures of my beetle experience. What made these harder to find is that almost all of the damage they did was underneath the cedar wrappers of three Indian Tabac Limited Reserve toros. Had I not pulled out an infested stick to smoke on the way to work last week, they might have been a lot farther along damaging cigars before I discovered them. Here are two of the sticks as they looked when I removed them from the humidor:
And here is what I found when I removed the cedar sleeves:
I had seen pictures of bore holes before, but I had never seen a shot where they had eaten large segments of the wrapper itself. Here is a closeup of the holes on the cigar on the right:
And here are the bore holes on a Rocky Patel Vintage 1990 Churchill they decided to excavate:
I figured out that these particular beetles (a) love Rocky Patel blends, and (b) don't like maduros.