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It's that time of year again when the ants and bees are gathering their armies for a full force invasion into your home! So how do you prepare yourself? First off is the outside inspection. Any holes or gaps that would allow any kind of bug enter the home will need to be sealed. Cable TV wires are often not sealed tightly with gaps around where the wire enters the house. Air conditioner cables are another area to look at. Any kind of pipe or wire that enters the home can be a possible highway for bugs and need to be sealed tight. Also stand in your garage and if you see light shining in under the garage door then the door is not shutting flush to the ground. Needs to be resealed. Next thing to do is cut back any tree limbs that are hanging over the roof and hanging onto the roof. This will help stop carpenter ants from entering your home. Trim back bushes and shrubs from the home and clean up and leafs that have gathers up against the house as this is a fantastic place from bugs to breed in and then enter the home. There are several do it yourself websites out there that offer pest control product s for sale. Gluetraps are great monitoring tools to see what is going on in the home and they are non toxic. You can also get any baits and other products to help control all kinds of insects. A good outside granule treatment will often times help keep alot of your outside pests at bay. Products like Talstar EZ or Demand G are excellent. Granule baits are also very effective. Maxforce has a great granule bait. Another good bait is Niban or Advance.

Carpenter Bees

What are some of the products to use in their control?

Dusts are the product of choice when treating carpenter bee galleries. You will need a ladder and some courage. The carpenter bees will no doubt dive bomb your. IF you are on a high ladder treating eaves or roof top areas then use extreme caution. The dusts you can use are drione dust or tempo. Delta dust is also very good because it repels moisture. Treat every hole you can find. Perma Dust or Tri Die are canned dust and in aerosol form and easier to use in these situations. Even after spending the afternoon thoroughly treating every possible hole they are using it still might not get all of them and it won't deter new ones from starting a hole right next to the old ones. At least you will get some relief. They are a tough insect to control. Good Luck.

Big Bees

There are alot of big bees flying around out there and people are confusing them with Bumble Bees. They are most likely Carpenter Bees. These bees are large and fly in a sometimes zig zag, crazy pattern and will often times dive bomb you as you get close to the area they are flying in. What happens is the female carpenter bee will be "drilling" out her gallery to nest in a place her egg in and the male protects the hole by flying aggressively around the area. The males lack stingers and won't sting, although they will act like they can by trying to scare you away. They often nest in wood eves of the house or wood fences. Really anything wood that is bare and outside can be used to nest in. You can notice "drippings" coming from the holes these bees drill and this is an indication of where to treat. You want to treat each gallery with a dust and seal the hole over with caulk. Pest control operators might powder spray the entire area. This will give good coverage and usually will control the bees for a while. After the effects of the pesticide has worn off other carpenter bees can re-infest the holes or start new ones. Sometimes painting bare wood with a heavy paint will deter them from drilling holes, but it doesn't always work. Even if you paint and treat it is not unusual for the bees to still be around as your neighbors may have them as well and they will still be evident. This job might be best suited for a pest control company and the jobs are usually expensive because of the time it takes to treat each area thoroughly.

Cluster Flies

Another phone call I got was from a friend complaining about large, slow flies. These sound to me to be cluster flies. They look like house flies except they are slightly bigger and a slow flyer. Many times you can swat easily as with a regular house fly it is not as easy to get them. Cluster flies will start to head to a house in August and hang out around the cracks and crevices of door frames or window frames and will over winter in a home. Many times they emerge on warm days in the winter or come spring time. If there are alot of them I usually recommend vacuuming them up with a hose vacuum. You can spray, but that is messy and unnecessary as these flys are slow and can usually be caught or killing with mechanical means.

Waterbugs

I had a friend call over the weekend about a cluster of waterbugs he found up in the joists of his home. He essentially found a pocket or a nest of the Oriental Roach and he was wondering how he should proceed. Usually with a waterbug problem I recommend a inside perimeter spray and baiting with Niban or some other kind of Baygon type bait. This time I told him to just get a good premixed spray from Home depot and spray the heck out of them. Half the job was done in finding the pocket of them, now killing the bulk of them will eliminate the problem. As always I told him to use caution and to warn the wife that there might be some strays that got away and retreated from the "waterbug killings". Anytime you can find the source or nest it is a good day.

Bedbugs in Schools

One thing that will need to be realized with the current bed bug epidemic is the fact that bedbugs are not just going to be found in flea bag motels. Bed bugs can be picked up in 5 star hotels, public transportation, cruise ships, airplanes, movie theaters, and schools. Bedbugs are parasites and unlike roaches that scatter when you come into the room and turn on the lights, bedbugs will run toward you. Unfortunately the problem is very wide spread and one tool that is probably most important that we can all use is education. We need to educate hotel workers, apartment building staff, hospitals, and teachers about what to look for and how to react when they see signs of bedbugs, whether they be live bugs or bite marks. We need to educate the public as well. Think about how easily a problem could spread if one child brings a book bag from an infested apartment complex to school for an entire school year and how the bedbugs that have hitch hiked in that bag everyday spreads to all the other bags and classrooms. Now these students and teachers are bringing them home. The bite marks that the students are presenting with are being blamed on bites from home, when they are actually from the school. A vicious circle begins. Same with any place else. You can treat someplace with an atom bomb if you wanted to but if you kept bringing those bedbugs back into your home from another source you are just setting yourself up for failure. The bedbug epidemic is going to get worse before it gets better, there is no doubt about that, but with the proper education and helping to raise awareness about these insects with the public rather then trying to hide the facts, I think we will be able to get a better hold of the situation.

Mouse control and peanut allergies.

A sensitive subject in today's world is that of peanut allergies. Children and adults are finding that they are severely allergic to peanuts and even the faintest scent can cause a reaction. It is because of this reason that pest control companies are moving away from glue traps that used to be scented with the smell of peanut butter and the reason products like Provoke were brought to market. Peanut butter was for the longest time the bait of choice for everyone who was trying to trap mice and now people are starting to look for good alternatives. As I mentioned earlier a new product on the market is Provoke which is only available to professional pest control companies, some other methods to use as an attractant to the traps would be chocolate, cheese, bacon pieces, and cotton or string. What used to be the great part about peanut butter was you could smear a little bit to the snap trap trigger and that would be enough to trap the mouse. With these other methods you have to be sure to secure it to the trap. If you are using bacon or cheese, be sure to secure it to the trigger. Chocolate syrup is easy to apply and the cotton again would need to be secure to the trap. Often switching up your methods of luring the mouse to the trap increase your chances of catching them anyway, so it is good to experiment with these other options and as always, use cation.

Termites and wood consumption

How much wood does a termite eat?

I got an email question about the amount of wood a termite eats and how fast they can damage a house. Bad news is if you already have termite activity in the wood members of your home then you have to get it treated. Good news is that they don't go through your house like you see in a cartoon where one minute your house is there and the next minute it's gone. Termites in the northeast called subterranean termites will eat about 13 lbs of wood per average colony. Formosan will eat almost double that. So when your termite sales person comes out and slaps you with an estimate for two thousand dollars to get your home treated you don't have to feel pressured to sign on the dotted line in fear of your home falling down. Having said that you do need to understand that if the damage has been going on unchecked for years and years and there is extensive structural damage then you should act as quickly as possible to get the damage fixed and the termite infestation treated.

Termites and wood consumption

How much wood does a termite eat?

I got an email question about the amount of wood a termite eats and how fast they can damage a house. Bad news is if you already have termite activity in the wood members of your home then you have to get it treated. Good news is that they don't go through your house like you see in a cartoon where one minute your house is there and the next minute it's gone. Termites in the northeast called subterranean termites will eat about 13 lbs of wood per average colony. Formosan will eat almost double that. So when your termite sales person comes out and slaps you with an estimate for two thousand dollars to get your home treated you don't have to feel pressured to sign on the dotted line in fear of your home falling down. Having said that you do need to understand that if the damage has been going on unchecked for years and years and there is extensive structural damage then you should act as quickly as possible to get the damage fixed and the termite infestation treated.

Cloths Moth

How do you get rid of cloths moths? Inspection. If you suspect you might have cloths moths you have to wage a battle of inspection to find the source, which is the larvae and what the larvae is feeding off of. Is it your wool sweater that has been in the basement for ten years? Maybe the cotton gloves that are shoved in your chest of drawers. You need to try to pinpoint an area to start with and usually you will have a higher concentration of moths in the room where the larvae are hanging out. Look for anything natural. Even the felt pads on piano keys and behind picture frames can be a source. Horse hair brooms, clothing, rugs, carpets. There is a lot to look through. You will be looking for holes and casings. Again, this is hard for the homeowner to determine and that is why it might be a good idea to call in an expert. One the source is located then those items need to be dry cleaned to kill the larvae. Many pest control people will ask you just to dry clean everything to be sure you got them all as there is no real way to tell unless you sift through each and every piece of clothing and every inch of that clothing. Then to get rid of the adults you can fog or use moth pheromones that will catch them. The hardest part of the job will be to find the source. Happy Hunting!

Termite Monitor

I was recently asked a question about termite monitoring. There are products on the market that allows the consumer to monitor the outside of their home for termites via an in ground station. Pest control companies also have entire programs that you can purchase that will monitor the ground around your house and when termites are found in the monitors then they replace the monitor with an active ingredient to start to kill the termite colony. These products go by the name of Firstline Smart Discs or Advance Termite Baiting System to name a few. The products offered to the consumer by places like Home Depot or Lowe's work along the same concepts. The difference is that the pest control people have experience in knowing if a monitoring station is full of termites or termite "mud" or just plain old mud. I think that if you just want to monitor the outside of your home then plain old wooden stakes will do you just fine. If you think you might have termites and you want to go ahead and do an actual baiting program then I'd hire a professional company. Anything to do with termites, in my opinion, should be handled by a pro.

Head Lice

Head lice usually isn't a pest control problem, it is more a problem to discuss with your pediatrician, but I thought this was a very interesting treatment for the problem that affects between 6 to 12 million Americans a year. With children missing 12-24 million days of school yearly across America, it is easy to see why parents are interested in any kind of lice control product that comes down the pike. What makes this product called, The Louse Buster, even better is that it requires no chemicals to treat the lice. The Lousebuster works like a hairdryer with a comb connected to it. The hot air blow the opposite way you comb and the treatment lasts for 30 minutes with an incredible success rate. The Lousebuster was developed by University of Utah biologists and is not yet ready for commercial use yet, but it is in development and will need approval. With lice being such a "headache" for parents (no pun intended) I'm sure the louse buster will be on the market sooner than later.

Rodents and Fires

I read an article in the paper yesterday and thought it would be a good topic for today's post. It was about a fire that was started in a home and there was no cause that could be found. The culprit often times is either a mouse or rat or squirrel that has gnawed on the electrical wires and sparked the fire. This is why it is so important to keep the rodents out and to eliminate them when they get in. Aside from the diseases they carry they are also a major fire hazard. So if you hear the scampering of little feet up in your attic or crawl space, don't hesitate to call your exterminator or catch them yourself, but whatever you do, catch them!

Roach Control

What's the difference between food roaches and water bugs and how can I control them?

Here's a question I got from the NE region of the country and there is a big difference. Food roaches are usually equated with the German roach. The small roaches you see in the kitchen cabinets or hiding in the cracks of your door frames. They can be distinguished with the 2 black lines that are on their head (to keep it simple). Water Bugs are really Oriental Roaches. They are usually shiny black and you see them alot outside on the pavements at nights or crawling up your basement wall or they scatter when you turn on the lights late at night on your kitchen floor. You usually won't find these roaches in your cabinets. The best way to control both of these pests is bait. Gel baits work best for German roaches and I found that granule baits work best for oriental roaches. Home Depot sells a gel bait that you can inject behind your splash boards on your counter tops and in the cracks and crevices of cabinets. Use the gel bait where you see the German roaches. Gel bait will also work on Oriental roaches if you can find a cluster of them where they might be nesting. The granule bait (Niban or baygon) can be sprinkled around hot water heaters or under sinks, in cracks or crevices. Read the label for application directions and cautions. Always use caution for children and pets. I would avoid spraying for German roaches, but a good perimeter spray around the inside and outside could give you some knock down with the oriental roaches or water bugs. Good Luck.

Roach Control

What's the difference between food roaches and water bugs and how can I control them?

Here's a question I got from the NE region of the country and there is a big difference. Food roaches are usually equated with the German roach. The small roaches you see in the kitchen cabinets or hiding in the cracks of your door frames. They can be distinguished with the 2 black lines that are on their head (to keep it simple). Water Bugs are really Oriental Roaches. They are usually shiny black and you see them alot outside on the pavements at nights or crawling up your basement wall or they scatter when you turn on the lights late at night on your kitchen floor. You usually won't find these roaches in your cabinets. The best way to control both of these pests is bait. Gel baits work best for German roaches and I found that granule baits work best for oriental roaches. Home Depot sells a gel bait that you can inject behind your splash boards on your counter tops and in the cracks and crevices of cabinets. Use the gel bait where you see the German roaches. Gel bait will also work on Oriental roaches if you can find a cluster of them where they might be nesting. The granule bait (Niban or baygon) can be sprinkled around hot water heaters or under sinks, in cracks or crevices. Read the label for application directions and cautions. Always use caution for children and pets. I would avoid spraying for German roaches, but a good perimeter spray around the inside and outside could give you some knock down with the oriental roaches or water bugs. Good Luck.