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Pest Control Specialists Contact Us

4012 N. Main Street
Dayton, OH 45405

QUESTION:

We did a treatment for a severe flea and tick problem three days ago. The customer called on the second day after the treatment that he still has a lot of fleas. What is the correct time span before a re-treatment is done?

ANSWER:

I listened to a wonderful presentation on fleas and flea management some years ago, presented by a flea expert and researcher from Florida. Many of his observations and comments really stuck in my mind, so I will pass them along to you. The first important thing is to understand the biology of fleas, which have the 4 stages of egg, larva, pupa, and adult flea. It is only the adult flea that feeds on blood. The larvae feed on various bits of organic junk they find in the carpet or whatever substrate they are living on, but in addition to this general feeding they also MUST feed on some dried blood, available in the form of dried fecal spots from the adult fleas. These fall off the pet and onto that substrate, and without this in their diet the flea larvae appear unable to move along to the next stage. In addition, it is important to recognize that the pupa is enclosed within a silk case that repels insecticides, so according to this expert our insecticide treatments will NOT kill the pupa. There is your trouble stage.

It is very important to prepare the infested home and the customer prior to the arrival of the technician on that very first day. By preparation I mean that the customer must be told what needs to be done before YOU get there, and that is to vacuum as thoroughly as possible every square inch of carpet, to remove everything from under beds and in closets to expose the carpeting for treatment, to have the pets dealt with so their fleas are eliminated, and to wash any pet bedding and throw it in the dryer. If they do not do all of this you will get there and only be able to do an inadequate job. Either that or YOU end up clearing the floor and vacuuming for them, and better get paid for the time. The vacuuming is absolutely vital, and it also should be done again the next day after you treat and for every day they can stand it for the next couple of weeks. Here is why.

A typical flea life cycle takes about 10 to 14 days from that egg dropping on the floor to a new adult flea emerging from its pupa/cocoon, but there is a small percentage of the fleas that just will not emerge until something physically “stimulates” them to pop out of that pupa. This may be physical touching and pressure or just strong vibration, and those “pre-adult” fleas can sit there in that pupa for up to 6 months. However, once stimulated they emerge within seconds and, according to the expert, may bite within a few seconds more. Any of those pupa hanging around may then change to adult fleas when someone walks in the room, and this is probably your source of this continued presence of fleas. Of course, it’s also very possible that you missed some hot spots in the home with your treatment, so you need to reinspect and evaluate where the flea larvae are living and be certain those places are treated. On the other hand, it would not make much sense to add insecticide back on top of insecticide you already sprayed, so retreating the same old surfaces may not be justified.

Part of “setting up” the job in advance is educating the customer to know what to expect, and they must expect to see some fleas for the next 2 weeks, because you are not going to kill the pupa with your sprays and activity in the home and constant vacuuming will eventually push all the pre-adult fleas out of that difficult stage. By the way, your competitors cannot kill flea pupa that are within their cocoons either, so no one has the magic wand. Advise the customer that their daily vacuuming is going to speed up this process and eliminate the fleas that much faster, getting them out of their pupae and exposed to your residual insecticide. If there really are a lot of adult fleas then a light misting of pyrethrum would kill them and provide the relief. In addition, your initial treatment really should include an IGR, as this will last for many months to prevent eggs from hatching and prevent flea larvae from developing to adult fleas.

My direct answer is that the correct time span, if possible, would be 2 weeks. The customer can shorten this by cooperating and vacuuming daily and keeping the pets and pet bedding free of fleas. If you do go back it should be to evaluate where you may have missed some spots where the flea larvae are developing, and this would need to be treated.

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QUESTION:

I have a few questions on bed bugs. Can you have bed bugs and not see brown spots on the mattress?
My client is saying that she did not feel being bitten – is that not normal as you would be asleep? My client traveled within the last 15 days and might have picked up this pest.

ANSWER:

This is one more reason that bed bugs present such a challenge to us – they do not always follow the rules. Typically, most people will not detect the biting activity of bed bugs, as the bug uses its saliva to numb the bite location enough to feed undetected. I have talked with several people who have told me they WATCHED the bug biting them and feeding on them and they felt absolutely no sensation of the bug’s proboscis being shoved into their skin. What someone might feel is the bugs crawling on them, but even this may not happen as the bugs often rest on the bed covers and feed on the skin exposed right at that point. What people find that alerts them to the possibility they have bed bugs is usually the red bumps that may or may not appear shortly afterward, and even this can be inconsistent, with some people showing no reaction at all and others having a very severe reaction.

When WE go into an account to determine whether or not bed bugs are present we look for several visible signs, and those dark brown/black spots are one of them. This is the fecal spot that bed bugs commonly leave behind, excreting a blood drop from their anus right after feeding. That little spot may appear on the sheets or along the mattress where the bug has wandered as it returned to its hiding place. These spots also may emit pheromones that guide the bug back to its harborage or enlist other bugs to seek that harborage site as well. These dark spots would normally be expected where you have a resident population of bed bugs, but if this is a relatively new infestation there may not be many spots yet or the bug may have dropped that spot someplace else that is less visible. So, blood spots are just one of the things we look for.

About 70% to 80% of the bed bugs in an infested room are going to be on the bed, mattress, box spring, or bed framing – in other words, right there as close as they can be to their food supply. The good news is that this helps us with our inspection, but should not be completely defining, as in a small infestation the bugs may have chosen to reside in the nearby furniture, carpet edges, or anyplace else nearby. But, we can carefully examine the folds of the mattress for blood spots, shed exoskeletons, tiny white eggs, or the bugs themselves. More difficult is to examine the box spring, as the bugs can find their way inside and hide in less obvious places.

If you cannot find any evidence I suggest you place monitor traps under the posts of the bed frame, such as one of the pitfall traps. You also can place other kinds of monitoring traps nearby along the edge of the carpet to see if any bugs find their way in and are captured. Catching this problem early on will really help you to eliminate the bugs with the least effort, although that effort is still going to be pretty extensive.

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QUESTION:

I have a one-year-old cat that is always eating things off the floor, like daddy long legs, pincher bugs, etc. If he ate a venomous spider, such as a black widow, would he die or get sick? I am crazy about this cat and keep the house pretty clean.

ANSWER:

I have a cat with a similar character. She’s intent upon catching dragonflies and small lizards, but do you think she’s ever done something worthwhile like killing a mouse or rat? I think the venoms from arthropods such as spiders and scorpions are dangerous only when injected into the skin by the spider or scorpion, and even this must be a deliberate effort on the part of the spider. I have often been asked by children if they could get poisoned by poking themselves with the fangs of a dead spider, and my answer is NO. They venom, first of all, is probably all dried up in the venom glands of a dead spider. Second, to inject the venom through the fangs requires muscles that squeeze that venom out of the sac it is stored in and through the tubes and fangs. Dead spiders cannot do this.

There also is a difference between “poisons” and “venom”. A poison would be a substance that could be dangerous no matter how it enters our body, such as swallowing it. A venom is a defensive substance that generally is effective only when it is injected into either our skin or our blood, affecting either the blood or the nervous system depending on the type of venom. When that same venom is swallowed it just does not have this immediate effect and access to the body system that it will affect. Most likely the stomach acids in your cat will digest the venom, and at the very least that venom will be so diluted in the stomach and gut that it would be passed along.

All that being said it still is a great idea to remove dead spiders and other venomous arthropods as soon as you see them. Sometimes that bug looks dead but may still have some muscle reaction left in it. I once handed a “dead” honeybee to my daughter to examine, and it stung her. I swear the darned thing was upside down and immobile on the sidewalk, but it must have only recently gone to that state and still had the muscles in the abdomen functioning, as it managed to plunge the stinger into her skin. And of course, she blamed ME.

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QUESTION:

I began a new pest service on a house that had been empty for a few months. The new occupants were in the process of moving into the home and
told us they were covered over with roaches. Upon inspection I did not see any insects whatsoever, but for the initial service I treated with
Demand CS and Nyguard. When finished, I saw three roaches cross the top of the ceiling in the kitchen. Since the initial service I have treated
2 more times. I never see any roaches nor any sign of roaches even though I inspect each time that I service the account. The customer calls every two weeks and tells me that she has
seen absolutely no improvement. They are still in the process of unpacking and I am wondering if the problem could be in the unpacked boxes which are everywhere. I am feeling like a failure! Do you have any ideas? Help, please! Thank you so much.

ANSWER:

Well, this speaks to a whole bunch of possibilities, one of which is going to be a polite lecture from me, so we’ll get that out of the way first. On your first visit you inspected and found zero bugs of any kind, but you still applied poison to the interior of this home. In this case you took the word of this untrained homeowner that they had roaches, but this is a dangerous path to tread. I truly understand that we want to help the customer, and often give into their demand that you spray something. But, without knowing for certain what pest was present, if any, you would not know what product to use nor how to apply it most effectively to eliminate that pest. Homeowners are generally very ignorant when it comes to Pest Identification, so that needs to be our first role, and if no pest is found we need to have the courage NOT to spray pesticides.

So, thanks for hanging in there through my soap box, and onto possibility #2 – this customer has a sweet deal going where they just keep on calling you back out and getting their place treated for free. I assume that you are not charging them for these “retreats”, but if you are not finding any pests then you really need to discontinue the applications of toxic substances in their home. Instead, go to a very  thorough program of monitoring to determine just what, if anything, is present there. Perhaps what they are calling roaches will turn out to be sowbugs, or earwigs, or Heaven help us, BED BUGS. You need to know what really is present there before you continue your program of management, and if your best efforts to capture some arthropod pests in this home turn up empty, this needs to be communicated to this customer and you should walk away from it. Perhaps you could sell them some insect monitors or glue traps and instruct them on where to place the traps, and if they actually capture something in the glue you can then identify it. But, all of this is costing you TIME, and you should be charging for every minute of it, just as any other service business will do.

Possibility #3 is simply that these folks have no tolerance at all for bugs, and the sight of a single insect on the floor or wall is translated to “They Are Everywhere!!”. Even so, a program of monitoring and trapping should be able to capture some of whatever it is they are seeing and you then can proceed with a proper knowledge of the problem. However, please be very careful about applying pesticides when you yourself have not seen any pests.

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QUESTION:

How do NUVAN Prostrips control gnats in a residential home if the strips are limited to closets and cupboards? What exactly do they emit to affect the adult and fly larvae/egg stages?

ANSWER:

Nuvan contains the fumigant dichlorvos, which we have known so well in the past as “vapona”, and these Prostrips have really breathed new life into this active ingredient. In particular, Nuvan Prostrips and Prostrips Plus are THE answer, at this time, for eliminating bed bugs and their eggs from within electronic equipment. Other than heating there may be no other useful method for ensuring that bugs and their eggs are killed within computers, TV’s, and other items where spraying or dusting is not an option. Dichlorvos vapors are released from the resin strips to fill an enclosed space with the active ingredient, and technically it is a fumigant, but one with very low volatility and little hazard to people or pets who are only briefly or casually exposed to it. We are not talking methyl bromide or sulfuryl fluoride here. Because of this, it requires a much longer exposure period to kill insects as well, so keeping the treated area closed is necessary to keep the level of vapors in it high enough to be effective.

Dichlorvos is effective on any stage of an insect, but obviously the insect (or egg or larva) must come into contact with the vapors, and with “gnats” this might be a tad iffy. The word “gnats” is probably a catch-all name for just about any small fly, so it could include fungus gnats, drain flies, phorid flies, or even fruit flies in the minds of people bothered by these small flies. However, as professionals we should take the extra step to actually capture some of the offending flies and make the actual identification. We know that each of these flies may be breeding in a very different micro-environment than the others do, so just accepting that we have small flying insects and using a shot gun approach in the hopes of eliminating them is not the best course of action. For all kinds of fly management we must focus on the source, not on the adult flies, and clearly you recognize this from your question.

We may have fungus gnats flying around anywhere inside a home, but the source may be larvae living within potted plants or coming from the crawl space or breeding within walls where excessive moisture is present. Putting some dichlorvos strips in a small enclosed space to kill the adult gnats may not be much more than a flyswatter approach. The vapors may never actually reach the larvae to control the problem at its source, and this is what is needed. Identification, inspection to determine where the origin of these flies is, and making corrections to that origin to eliminate the ability for the flies to continue breeding there are the best steps to take for long term satisfaction. The use of Nuvan strips for fly management would only be for the temporary relief from the adult flies. Of course, if you had the strips placed where the vapors could move into that breeding site it could kill the eggs too, but we would have to be honest and admit that the problem (the conducive conditions) probably continue to exist, and this could lead to more flies in the future.

Nuvan strips are GREAT tools for some difficult pest problems, so we should consider their use where they are effective.

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QUESTION:

How can I tell the difference between bed bugs and fleas?

ANSWER:

I can answer this question in 2 different ways, depending on how I interpret what you are asking. The more obvious would be that you are asking for actual differences to distinguish a flea from a bed bug, and the answer to this would be to direct you to the Pest ID resource on PestWeb to view some images of each of these blood feeding pests. They really look nothing alike. Fleas are smaller and are compressed from side to side, while bed bugs are larger and flattened from top to bottom. If you have the actual specimens on hand there should be no mistake. Fleas also hop to move while bed bugs only walk. Fleas tend to have a black coloration while bed bugs are white as the early nymph and reddish brown as the later nymphs or adults.

What you may be asking instead is how to distinguish an infestation of some biting pest as either bed bugs or fleas, or how to tell which pest is present based upon the “bite” marks on people in that infested place. For that second possibility I can only say that we, in the professional pest control industries, should NEVER identify a pest problem based only upon the presence of red marks on someone’s skin, nor take the customer’s word for it that they are actually being bitten by something. It is our responsibility to sample until we confirm the presence of some arthropod that could be biting, or on the other hand to confirm that nothing is present and therefore there is no reason to spray a single drop of insecticide. I have a collection of wonderful letters sent to the local university or to local pest management companies, from people who truly believed they were being bitten or otherwise by some pest, but who clearly were suffering from Delusions of Parasitosis. A couple of those letters would make Steven Spielberg’s skin crawl, and to get involved in the mental issues of these kinds of people by spraying toxins in their home would be a terrible mistake.

So, avoid making a diagnosis based only upon symptoms claimed by the customer. Instead, go to a monitoring program initially to determine just what is actually present. The customer may actually be getting bitten by some arthropod, but they may decide in their mind that it is rat mites or some other specific pest, and your monitoring and sampling might turn up something entirely different. If you go ahead and treat for mites when the problem is fleas, or treat for fleas when the problem is bed bugs, you are doomed to failure. Proper identification means capturing some of the bugs present, examining them with the proper magnification and ID keys, and then going ahead with the proper method for eliminating them.

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QUESTION:

You recently answered a question for me regarding the best method of eliminating carpenter ants from a residence during the winter. Thank you for the answer. However, how do you know the nest has been eliminated?

ANSWER:

Good morning Judith, and good question. I suppose it would be like many other pest insects in that you judge the success by the lack of the insects in the future. This would mean placing insect monitoring traps in places where they might be likely to capture wandering ants over the next few weeks, but not where they will bother the residents or be accessed by the family dog. If you believe you know where the nest was located you could also listen to see if any “rustling” sounds could be heard within that void, pehaps using a stethoscope to enhance your ability to hear things within some hidden space. Perhaps a sharp bang on that wall would stir up any ants still inside that space, and if so you might be able to hear them running around.

But, with just about any kind of pest, from termites to roaches to bed bugs, we have to measure success by the fact that no more activity is being seen from the pest. This may take awhile, and for pests like carpenter ants there even is the possibility that pupae that were in that satellite colony in the structure could hatch to new adult ants, and these ants could then become active. This would be particularly so if only bait was used to eliminate the colony, as that bait might not be present in the nest any longer. Another good reason to dust within the nest itself if you possibly can locate it, using a residual dust or an inorganic dust that will last for a long time. This way any emerging adult ants would immediately be exposed to the dust and be affected by it.

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QUESTION:

I am dealing with an apartment complex where every week they are finding new apartments with bedbugs. As far as insecticides, is there any one that so far has proven to work more than others? I am aware of mattress protections and vacuuming etc, but if it were you what would be your top preference of insecticide, with or without an added IGR, to appply for treatment. Thank you in advance for your answer.

ANSWER:

Your situation is not all that uncommon, judging by the talks I attended at the recent NPMA Conference, where a great many educational sessions were devoted to the topic of Bed Bugs. The problems are compounded in multiple family housing for several reasons. One of these is the cost to completely eradicate the bed bugs once they have gotten a foothold, and apartment managers often balk at that cost and opt for chasing the bugs around instead. Another problem is the tenants themselves – poor preparation, refusal to cooperate, refusal to admit they have bed bugs, etc. There also are battles between managers and tenants over who should pay for the cost of removal, and while the argument goes on the bed bugs expand their presence.

The fight against bed bugs in this situation has to involve educating the tenants themselves. They MUST learn about the bed bugs, how to prevent bringing bugs in themselves, and how to deal with the bugs once they have them as well as how to inspect their own apartments for the bugs. Some apartments are now offering FREE clothes dryers, but charging more for the use of the washers, in the hope that tenants who have traveled will immediately place everything in the dryer that can be there. A hot dryer by itself is capable of killing all bugs and eggs on clothing, in backpacks, blankets, stuffed toys, etc.

If we speak only in terms of insecticides I am going to offer you the list given by one NPMA speaker, who surveyed the pest control industry in 2011 and asked that question – what chemical products are most used by our industry. This is not my endorsement of any of these, as I don’t want to anger manufacturers whose products I did not mention, but the list may be helpful to you. This survey found that Phantom was used by 51% of PMP’s, Temprid by 42%, Bedlam 28%, Gentrol, Alpine, and Transport all about 15%, DeltaDust about 12%, and Suspend, Tempo, and Drione all about 10%. What this may tell us is that MANY different active ingredients and chemical families and formulations work well on bed bugs IF the product is placed where the bugs will contact it for a very long time. It remains a fact that treating baseboards and other exposed surfaces in the hope that the bugs will walk ACROSS the treated surface will be ineffective. The materials must be placed directly into the bed bug harborages where they will be in contact with it for hours.

In this manner you also directly treat the bugs with the wet spray or the dust particles, ensuring maximum contact with the active ingredient. One speaker made the comment that the Common Bed Bug has an extremely high potential for developing resistance to just about any insecticide active ingredient. It may not matter what product you use – it is how it is used that is important, and this means crack and crevice treatment, void treatment with dusts, treating along and under carpet edges and behind baseboards, etc. There does not appear to be any single insecticide active ingredient that currently is the magic material for the common bed bug, and it may never come along. Control now relies on all of those non-chemical steps combined with proper use of insecticides, continued monitoring to determine the success, and likely some repeat treatments where bed bugs continue to be present.

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QUESTION:

I guess we all know to remove the honey and hive after exterminating honeybees. It surprises me at how fast other bees and insects will move in to collect the honey. But, what if you can’t get to the honey? Case in point is a recent job I did on a 5th-wheel RV type mobile home. You darn near have to tear it apart in order to get to all the honey. These mobile homes are a common habitat for bees and in my small bee control experience I have run into several infested RV’s. My question, is there another method of dealing with the old hive other than removal?

ANSWER:

The awful truth is that the honey should (must) be removed in some way, and therein lies the problem. In looking at a few resources from Beekeepers Associations there do not seem to be any good hints on how to get the honey to be removed by other bees, and of course allowing the honey to remain within a void in a structure is an open invitation to other honeybees to attempt to colonize the same place. Ants will certainly detect that that remaining honey and, once the bees are eliminated, will also move in to enjoy the feast. If you are in a region that gets hot in the summer the wax comb will melt without the bees there to maintain it, and the honey then flows wherever it darned well pleases, creating a major mess that is going to be a lot more expensive to repair than if the hive and honey had been removed right away.

The amount of honey might be minimized by waiting until very early spring to eliminate the bees, as they feed on the honey all winter long where it is too cold for them to continue to forage. But, less honey is still honey, and one way or another that hive will need to be located and the area opened for physical removal of it. The entire area of the hive should also be scrubbed well to remove all traces of odor of the hive and honey, or it could continue to be an attraction to other insects. In addition, simply killing the active bees and stopping at that point still leaves a lot of pupae in the hive that will develop on through to new adult bees, and there is a possibility that these new bees could regenerate the colony.

So, there is the dilemma that needs to be told to the owner of that RV. One way or another the hive has to come out, and this means opening the wall to get to the hive. You might be able to narrow the search for the hive using a digital camera on a tube, where you can slip the flexible extension tube into an opening in the wall to take a look inside the void. I have seen these cameras available in stores now for very little money, and you can view the scene right on the small attached digital screen. If you are unsure where the nest is this can really help, and then only the necessary wall materials need to be removed to get to the hive. Once the hive is removed and the wall repaired, ideally by a licensed contractor who knows how to do this kind of destruction and repair properly, a careful inspection of the exterior of this home can be made to see what exclusion steps can be taken to prevent more bees from invading in the future.

Again, looking over those beekeeper websites and university websites on dealing with honeybees in walls, they all more or less apologize for the fact that dismantling the wall is going to be needed. Leaving the honey there just leads to too many other problems. I suggest that anyone doing honeybee removal have this advice in writing, and have the customer SIGN the contract to indicate that they were advised of the need to have the hive removed. If it is not in writing and they fail to take that step they could come back and blame you for not telling them of the problems, and in court the sympathies could just lie with the victim – that homeowner now facing major repair costs.

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QUESTION:

From time to time I attempt to catch gophers from a customer’s property and go through the process of trying to open the lateral and follow it to the runway in order to set my traps. It can be very difficult to do sometimes, due to the type of soil, moisture, landscaping features, etc. I position the trap in the most likely spot, cover the hole, then check back the next day, and often for several days to reposition the trap or do more digging. Many times I have gone for several days with no activity at the location. Even though I didn’t catch the rascal he’s still GONE. No more gopher on the property. What is your opinion about whether to charge the customer for the time spent and the fact that no gopher is present after so many days, or charging only if a gopher WAS caught. I have always kinda had mixed thoughts and can make a case in my own mind either way. What do you think?

ANSWER:

Well, that opens an interesting discussion on whether or not a carcass of the pest must be presented to the customer for your work to be considered successful. My knee-jerk response is that no, of course you do not need to present the dead gopher for you to have dealt with it so that it no longer bothers the customer. Now that I’ve stated my position let me try to justify it with some other comparisons.

First, killing gophers or other mammals is not always the goal of the management program. Many homeowners may opt for things such as repellents or exclusion, and these certainly do not kill the gopher but only cause it to go somewhere else and cause misery. What YOUR customer has contracted with you to do is to remove this gopher in some manner so that it no longer is causing damage on their property. What means you choose is up to you, and since the result you find here is that the gopher no longer seems to be on the property of your customer I would say you successfully completed your end of the contract. Just because it is not in the trap does not also mean that it was not killed in some way. Perhaps it was captured but managed to remove itself only to die somewhere else in the burrow system. Perhaps your activity in its secretive burrow frightened it so that it moved away from the area.

If the customer tries to make the case that “well, it could come back again” the same could be said for any other gophers living around that property. When you remove one gopher it opens up that property so that others may move onto it without competing with the previous resident gopher. Your elimination of one gopher could not possibly be a guarantee that no more will bother this client. Another comparison could be gopher control with the use of bait or fumigant, where you rarely would see dead gophers laying around, but assume success and control based on the fact that their activity has ended on the property. And, since the end of that activity coincided with your efforts I would connect the dots and suggest that you were responsible for it, and should absolutely be paid for the time you have spent there.

This is a paradigm shift our industry has attempted for awhile now, educating the homeowner or other customer that they are paying you for relief from pest problems, and NOT paying you to “spray” something. Pesticide applications may well be needed as a part of the overall program of pest management, but that program also involves inspecting, monitoring, exclusion, etc., and all of this requires your valuable time. I guarantee that nearly every other service industry charges for their time spent on the property, not just for the time spent changing a part. There can be a great satisfaction from a trapping program for gophers if you actually catch the gopher, but I don’t think you should have any internal ethical argument with yourself about charging for your work if the desired result was achieved.

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