Preventing fungus in the lens

My lenses are still clear, edge to edge.  There is no fungus that I can see.  I hope to be able to keep it that way forever.  However, as I was shooting in the rain again yesterday, I was thinking I was just asking for trouble.  With a plastic cover over the lens or not, there is still quite a bit of moisture that the lens can draw in and out of the lens barrel.  It's worse if there are rain drops on the lens, and of course, there were.  I tried to keep the lens dry as much as I could but there was nothing I could do to keep moisture out.  When I got back to the car, I could see there were moisture inside the lens again.  Zooming in and out extends and contracts the barrel and moisture can be seen on the barrel.

I believe all the moisture has been drawn out now, but to be sure, I will keep the lens extended out to allow as much moisture to escape as possible.  I left the lens sitting on my bed.  It is a dry environment so hopefully the moisture will naturally escape from the lens.

To deter fungus formation, a lens should be kept in a dry and cool environment.  To help with that, I just purchased from eBay a couple of silica gel boxes.  These blue silica gel beads turn red after absorbing moisture from the air.  They advertise that the gel can be dehydrated back to their blue colour with a microwave oven.  In addition to these two silica gel boxes, I will order 100 small sachets of white silica gel.  These blue gel beads will be my indicator that the gel need to be dried out so when I dry the blue gel I will dry the normal white gel at the same time.

Blue silica gel that will turn red with moisture.

I cannot wait for these blue gel to arrive.  I think they look pretty cool!  I will like to take some macro photos of them.