A mother about to cook her children’s dinner was horrified after finding hundreds of black bugs crawling inside a packet of pasta she had just bought.

Hayley O’Shea, 39, began pouring out the fusilli from Tesco for a tuna pasta bake when she saw the infestation of weevil bugs.

The mother-of-two quickly threw the pasta and the bugs in the bin and sealed up the bag that hadn’t been opened before.

She has no idea how the swarm of the beetle-type bug got into the 500g bag.

Mrs O’Shea called Tesco to complain and was as first told someone would come and collect the packet from her home in Bournemouth, Dorset, so they could investigate.

When nobody arrived she emailed the supermarket giant again but was then told she would have to return it to a store.

Mrs O’Shea, an account manager at a marketing company, said she is concerned that other bags of pasta could contain the bugs.

Mrs O’Shea said: “I bought the pasta from the Tesco online shopping service.

“I opened it and tipped some into a pan for my children’s dinner and noticed lots of little black things.

“Initially I thought it might have been something burnt on the bottom of the pan so I drained the pasta under the tap, then I looked closer and saw they were insects.

“I looked at the rest of the packet and it was absolutely crawling with them. There must have been hundreds of the things.

“My two children were horrified and now won’t eat pasta again. I had no idea what they were so I looked it up on the internet and realised they were weevil bugs.

“I contacted Tesco and they said someone would come and collect the pasta but they didn’t turn up, so I emailed them and they told me that it wasn’t their policy to do so.

“They refunded me the money and gave me a 10 pounds compensation voucher but it’s not money I’m after. I am outraged that they didn’t want to find out where these weevils came from, it’s like they don’t care.”

Mrs O’Shea has been refunded the cost of the pasta and given a 10 pounds gift voucher.

A Tesco spokeswoman said: “If a customer finds something in their food that they think shouldn’t be there, we would ask them to return it to store as soon as possible so we can conduct a thorough investigation.”