Microwaves are indeed tuned to act on water the most. A cigar is certainly not 65-70% water, that's the RH. The RH is the ratio of how much water the air contains to how much water it could hold at a given temperature (without condensate, or dew forming). We consider a cigar to be at a particular RH when it has come into equilibrium with air at that RH.
A cigar has undergone significant drying since it was a living organism. I'd be willing to bet that a beetle larva or egg contains more water and would therefore cook faster than the tobacco in your cigar. I personally think that the several minutes mentioned in the article is pretty excessive. Trying to create hotspots at the beetle eggs and larva would demand very intense power for as short a time as will get the job done.
On the other hand, I don't have the money to go around test nuking my precious smokes! If I were a manufacturer, I would certainly experiment with this. In my case, I don't know for sure that any of my cigars have live beetle eggs to run an experiment, and I don't think I'd be willing to sacrifice them at this point!
You would need at least a dozen known infested (with live eggs) cigars, half for nuking, half for control. Then you would nuke the test sticks for varying lengths of time and observe how much damage it did. Finally you would observe the smokes at 75%, 85* for six months or so. If the damage to the stick was negligible at a level of microwaving that eliminated the beetle problem, it might be worthwhile!
I would try this with my T******* sticks, but I don't know that they are infested. That and it's tough to say that one of those was "ruined" by nuking... :wink:
If anyone else has the resources to run the experiment, I'm sure we'd all love to hear the results!
