QUESTION:
Any suggestions on treating a “true” log cabin home for ticks? There is no drywall or paneling on the interior.
Thanks
ANSWER:
Once ticks manage to get inside it can be a nightmare. The engorged female tick that falls off the host animal may be looking for a place to deposit her thousands of eggs, and if those eggs do manage to hatch just imagine the thousands of hungry little larval ticks that now are looking for their first blood meal. Identification of the tick would be somewhat important here. If it is the Brown Dog Tick then at least the residents could be assured that the ticks are less likely to choose them for the food than the family dog. The residents also should be offered information on how to prevent this from happening in the future, by carefully inspecting their pets every day to ensure they remove any ticks picked up outside, and ensuring the ticks are killed once removed.
The female engorged tick is going to look for some protected place to dump her eggs, and this could be just about any crack, crevice, or hole in the room. It may be within furniture, behind pictures and other items on a wall, behind baseboards or edges of carpets, or in the case of a log cabin with exposed logs inside obviously in all the gaps that occur between each log. I could go out on a hunch here and suggest that the tick is most likely to enter the first available crevices, meaning lower areas on the walls rather than upper ones, but there really is no way to know this, and ticks often do climb to upper areas of walls. It probably also is most likely that the ticks will fall off the infested pets near to where the pets sleep, so you should concentrate on possible hiding places around that area or areas. My own house cat sleeps EVERYwhere in our home, choosing one place for a week and then moving on. Thus, if pets sleep on furniture the engorged females could even be inside the couch or recliner, and all areas there would need to be inspected and treated.
You can employ a high powered vacuum along every crevice first, and this will help to physically remove ticks that may be within a shallow crevice or hole. Synthetic pyrethroids still should be excellent for killing these arachnids, and a very thorough application using crack and crevice tips to inject the material directly into all openings you can will help to kill the ticks now as well as the newly emerging ticks if they hatch within the next couple of weeks. Unfortunately, tick eggs may not hatch for up to a couple of months, and by then the residual effectiveness of the material you applied may not be around anymore. It may require a second treatment, and the most likely way to get the contact with the ticks is to apply the material directly into the places they hide, rather than baseboard and general surface treatments where the ticks may pass over the surface too quickly.
I suggest the use of a vacuum, dusting within nearby voids and along carpet edges, and treating crack and crevice with a residual product into as many crevices as possible. And, strongly encourage daily inspection of the pets to remove any ticks on them.
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Pest QuestionsFebruary 19, 2012
