The holiday season is upon us, and that means many families will be traveling to visit loved ones all over the country. This is a great, and by great we mean terrible, opportunity to pick up a louse infestation from hotels or family and friends! We often get frantic calls from clients wanting us to come treat their home, or their sandbox, for lice. Typically they are surprised to find …Read More
While it is true that sometimes we can’t eliminate fire ants completely, we can certainly control them effectively. Using the correct products at the correct time can result in 90-95% control throughout the year. By timing applications based on seasonal behaviors, we use the ant’s biology against them. April During the winter and early spring, fire ants depend largely on stored food to survive. They retreat deeper underground to avoid …Read More
Every year we experience some sort of a pest scourge. From scorpions to lovebugs, they all get their time to shine and appear at different intervals. This year, we decided to use our experience, education, and wild guesses to make predictions about what pests will do in the year to come. Centipedes, millipedes, earwigs, and pillbugs There should be no problems until late July to mid-August. Irrigated areas will probably …Read More
Have you been trying to fight rodents on your own? If so, you may have noticed some changes in what you can buy over the counter. The EPA recently launched several new rules to reduce the risk to non-target organisms from rodenticides. Their main concerns were dangers to children, pets, and wildlife from homeowner misapplication, naturally. Bait stations – All rodenticide bait products marketed over the counter must now be sold …Read More
Why yes, they are. Hairy rasberry crazy ants to be more specific. Just as the imported fire ant invaded the United States in the early 1900s and snuffed out other native species of insects, the rasberry crazy ant has found its way in and is beginning to do the same. Before you ask, I did not spell raspberry wrong, they are named after Tom Rasberry, the pest control operator that …Read More
If you’ve lived in a home long enough, shoot if you’ve lived long enough period, chances are you’ve had to deal with a rodent invading your space at some point. Rats can enter your home through any opening the size of a quarter while mice only need an opening the size of a dime, so you can see how easy it can be for them to gain entry. If you only …Read More
In a past blog post, Don’t Do It Yourself: 8 Jobs You Should Leave to the Pros, we highlighted an article discussing some jobs around your home that were suggested you leave to the professionals. On the list were things like electrical work, tree removal, and most importantly for our purposes here…pest control. The reason we’re bringing up pest control again in this manner is because of an article that …Read More
Mosquito Slap Dance – Watch the video below! Many of you have noticed, or at least brought to our attention, that mosquito pressure has not been as bad this year as it typically is during the summer. Most folks blame the drought and lack of rainfall for that. However, if you look outside, you will notice your yard is probably still nice and green. What about your neighbors’ yards? Hmm, how …Read More
Occasionally, we receive requests to treat people’s pantry for pests. The requests are usually for “weevils” or “those little moths”. In the pantry, they are typically stored product pests, the most common of which are the drugstore beetle, cigarette beetle, weevils (granary, rice, maize), flour beetles (red and confused), sawtoothed grain beetle, and Indianmeal moth. Believe it or not these guys are all pretty easy to tell apart under magnification. …Read More
Last week, we wrote about four ridiculous pest myths that we wanted to debunk, one of them was about spiders. Well, today we’re devoting the entire post to spider myths alone, and there are plenty of them! How dangerous are brown recluses? Are daddy longlegs poisonous? This first one we mentioned in last week’s post but we’ve heard more details so figured we’d mention it again. 1. The average person …Read More