Newsletter Mar/Apr 2016

Posted by Mark A. Puglisi, ACE on Fri, Mar 04, 2016 @ 10:10 AM


Here Come The Pests!

Pests have been less active outdoors, but that always changes as the weather starts to warm in the spring. As pests wander about outdoors searching for food, water, shelter, mates, and places to lay eggs, many will find their way into homes. They don't care that you haven't invited them in!  For these pests, even the smallest cracks and crevices are like a big, inviting "bug doorway" for them.

     Fortunately, our professionally applied perimeter treatments help prevent pests from invading your home. These treatments are applied around the foundation of your home and in other key areas. Perimeter treatments are especially effective at stopping crawling pest from invading your home-halting many pest problems before they begin. Our perimeter treatments stop invasions of pests like ants, crickets, centipedes, and many, many others.

    Keeping pests out is important not only because they can be a major annoyance, and are embarrassing. Invading pests can also leave odors and stains, droppings and dead insect bodies, and webbing, plus contaminate human and pet food. Some can cause allergies or bite and sting. In fact every year in this country a half million people are rushed to the hospital emergency room because of stings by bees, wasp, ants, spiders, and scorpions.

     Yes, you can be sure pests will return! But our expert perimeter treatments are just one of the many tools we have in our arsenal to help our customers enjoy a more enjoyable life with fewer pests and pest-related problems.


Watch for Termite Swarmers!

One way homeowners discover they have termites is when they see winged reproductive termites, called swarmers. During swarming season, hundred of termites with wings will make a mass exodus out of a colony and take to the air. Usually this happens after a rain as the temperatures begin to warm and the days lengthen, but it can happen at other times as well.

     Once these termites emerge from their nest, they quickly begin flying, and any wind will spread them even further. They quickly pair up, pry off their wings, and retreat to a cozy dark place where they mate and start a new colony. Swarmers that emerge indoors are attracted to bright lights and are often found around windows and lights. Finding termites or their wings indoors is almost always a sign that the house is infested and being attacked by these wood-destroyers.

     Termites in periods of low rainfall are less likely to swarm. At those times they often do deeper into the ground, waiting for more favorable conditions. Also, only mature colonies produce swarmers. So termites may be eating your home even if you don't see swarmers or other signs of termites.  A professional inspection is the best way to determine if your home is infested with termites.

     Call us if you haven't had a recent inspection for wood-destroying pests, or if you find swarmers or other signs of termites, and will schedule an inspection.  Finding infestations early and eliminating them before they cause major damage can easily save you hundreds, and sometimes many thousands of dollars.

El Niño Affects Pests

The El Niño weather patterns we are experiencing now mean different things for different parts of the country, but much of the country will probably be either or both wetter and warmer than normal. Many people are asking what that will mean for pest populations this year.

     That is difficult to know at this point, but we can look at the 1997-1998 season, which was also a very strong El Niño year like this one. There was a glut of pests that year-much HIGHER numbers of everything, including mosquitoes,

Soy-Based Wiring Attracts Rodents

Many car companies are experiencing problems because they replaced metal or plastic parts with a bio-degradable product. Unfortunately, these are sometimes food based products that pests love to eat. The latest case is Honda, who in their quest to "go green," used a soy-based biodegradable wire coating on some of their engine wiring rather than a plastic coating. Apparently the soy-based coating is quite tasty to hungry mice, rabbits, and squirrels.  They will chew on it and cause the engine to malfunction.

     One man claims he had to take his 2012 Honda Accord in twice to have the wiring fixed because of gnawing rodents, and there are many other cases of this happening. We get many calls from our clients that have stored vehicles that have been infested with rats in their engine compartment, with severe damage.

     Soy used in vehicles has caused some funny problems in the past. In the mid 40's license plates in some states were made from compressed soy beans and fiberboard, as a way to save on using metal during the ear. But they soon found that goats and cows were attracted to the vehicles, and would chew off entire license plates!



Tags: Termites, ants, swarms

July/August 2014 Newsletter

Posted by Mark A. Puglisi, ACE on Wed, Jul 02, 2014 @ 09:31 AM

Landscape That attracts termites

Landscaping That Attracts Termites

Many people  don't realize that their landscaping can attract termites and carpenter ants to their home. Here are some of the common problems we see:

  • Mulching with wood chips or bark next to your foundation not only provides food for termites, it also keeps the soil more evenly moist under the mulch, which attracts termites. Even gravel mulches have been shown to keep soil underneath them more moist. Leave the area mulch-free around your foundation. If you going to mulch around it, keep it as a thin layer.

  • Remove plants near your foundation.  If possible, keep vegetation 3-4 feet away from away from the exterior of your home. Especially remove thick groundcovers, plus vines that crawl up the sides of your home, and prune back branches that touch the sides or roof of your home. Never plant too close to your foundation, because large shrubs and trees eventually can have roots that expand under a foundation and crack it, leaving it open to hidden invasion by termites.

  • Eliminate dead wood in the landscape. Remoce old tree and shrub stumps and any wood debris. Keep an eye on railroad ties used in landscaping, because even though they are treated to protect them from pests, when they crack they can allow termites and carpenter ants into the inner part, which is unprotected.

  • Check for excess moisture. For instance, sprinkler systems sometimes spray water onto the side of a home-make sure this is not happening.

If you haven't had a professional inspection recently, call us today about this service. An inspection can detect an infestation early, and can spot the above conditions and many others that arract termites.

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Ants Are Increasing

Ants are highly successful insects and are becoming more serious pest each year. In fact, a number of years ago they overtook the cockroach as the most common household pest problem.

     One of the main reasons ants become the #1 pest is that certain "super ant" species (sometimes also called "tramp ants") have been spreading. Pest like Argentine ants, odorous house ants, velvety tree ants, and pavement ants are just a few of these. Most (but not all) of these aggressive ants are from other countries and have become widespread around the world.

     Super ants share a common characteristics that help explain why they are so "successful" at spreading. They are spread primarily through human activity, and they easily adapt to living around us. Plus, most ants have only one egglaying queen in the colony, but super ants have many egg-laying queens in the same colony, so colony grow much faster.

     These ants also usually have many interconnected colonies. Instead of fighting ants from nearby colonies of the same species, as most ants do, the colonies actually cooperate to some degree. When they come to a new area super ants usually drive out other ant species, especially native ants. Since the new ants have larger colonies, you end up with large number of ants, and ants that more frequently invade homes.

     Don't let your frineds and neighbors suffer with ant problems! Tell them about our expert ant services. Because of the gradual spread of super ant species, our professional ant control and prevention has become more important than ever before.

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Stink Bug Overwintering Sites

The brown marmorated stink bug has been an increasing problem in many areas because it invades homes in the fall, spending the entire winter indoors. The new stink bug really stinks when disturbed-more than most other stink bugs.

     Because so little is known about this pest, scientist reported in a recent study that they used trained dogs to sniff out where they were overwintering in a forested area. Surprisingly, they didn't find the bugs in downed trees or leaf litter-they were found mainly in dry crevices of dead, still-standing trees with thick bark, especially oak and locust trees.

     The stink bug's choice of these kinds of overwintering sites shows why they are so attracted to man-made structures-homes to them look like their preferred sites of dry, tall trees with lots of cracks and revices.

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Why Are Flies so Hard to Swat?

Lots of flies are buzzing this time of the year! We've all tried to swat a fly and missed it. Whether flies are in flight or resting on a surface, they seem to have lightning-fast speeds and reflexes.
     A recent article in the journey Science looked at flies and how the respond to perceived threats coming their way. Their reflexes are so fast (less than one hundredth of a second) that it required special high speed cameras that shoot 7,500 frames per second to capture action.

     The discovered that flies perform different escape maneuvers based on which direction (their back, front, or side) the threat is coming from while they are flying. The complex pitch and roll maneuver that the flies perform is uniform and predictable, like a jet fighte!

     When flies are resting on a surface, they also respond predictably. The first take a whild leap, stumbling up into the air, and only when airborne do they finally begine flapping their wings. This all happens so quickly, that the flies are able to throttle up to full power a 50th of the time it takes you to blink your eyes.

     Any tips we can take home with us to use when swatting a fly? The researchers noted tat if you apprioach a resting fly from it's side, it will fly straight away from you, so if you keep your hand going in the same direction, you should be able to catch up to it. Try it.

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The Largest Spider Webs

Spider in Madagascar, first discovered by scientists in 2001, builds spider webs so large that they are sometimes seen spanning a river!

     Webs from Darwins's bark spider have been discovered as wide as 82 feet-about-about as long as two city buses. It was found that the silk used to make these webs is the toughest spider silk on earth. The silk strands can resist twice as much force as any other spider silk before rupturing-over 10 times more than a similarly sized piece of Kevlar! This makes it the toughest biological material known.

     Imagine walking into a spider web that large tough!

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Chikungunya Virus is Coming

You may have never heard of the Chickungunya virus (sometimes simply called 'CHICKV' ) before, but health authorities are bracing for it to come to the U.S. So far, infections have been confirmed in several states, but they have all been from people who traveled recently to the Caribbean or Asia, where they caught the disease.

     Chicungunya is a virus transmitted by the bite of an infected mosquito. We already have mosquitoes here in North America that are capable of spreading the disease, but they have not been infected yet. But if one of these mosquitoes bites a person here that has been infected in another country and it still sick, it then has the potential to spread the virus when it bites again. ( This is similar to how the West Nile virus got started in our country country more than a decade ago.)

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Good News on Cancer Risk

The Environmental Protection Agency studies and bans pesticides that cause significant health risks, but some people think that all pesticides are bad, and should be banned. One of their claims is that they cause cancer-something that has been very difficult to study.

     A massive new study in the United Kingdom was recently released that is one of the largest and longest studies ever conducted on this subject. It looked at 59,085 male plus 3,875 female commercial pesticide applicator's death rates between 1987 and 2005. The study found that this group of people, who are exposed to far more pesticides every day than the general public is, actually had lower cancer rates than the general public!

     This new information, plus the fact that our company uses less and safer pesticides than what was used in the United Kingdom during that period, makes us very happy! And it makes our spouses and mothers glad! We hope it makes you feel good as well.

     We don't mean to imply that pesticides be used by anyone in an unsafe manner, which people can do even with store-bought pesticides they use themselves. We are trained and experienced in proper pesticides use, so it helps everyone to be safer. This is good news. 

     Personally I have been around pesticides 5 days a week, 10 hours a day, for the past 37 years.  I have worked with just about every product there is over the years and have no concerns for my safety as a professional.  Our industry has made many changes in the products we use and they have an outstanding record for their safety, when used properly. We are true protector's of health, without pesticides we would not enjoy the longevity we have without the ability to control the many diseases that insects spread through responsible applications.

Tags: Termites, ants, landscape, mulch, ground cover