RI, MA EHS Pest Control Blog

Swarming Bees Kill Elderly Couple

An elderly Texas couple were killed by bees this week after they apparently tried to remove the insects from a fireplace in a house on a remote ranch, the Valley Morning Star reported Wednesday.

William Steele, 90, died Monday in the house on a ranch outside Hebbronville, Texas, about 100 miles west of Corpus Christi. His wife, Myrtle Steele, 92, died Tuesday after she was flown to a Corpus Christi hospital, the couple's daughter-in-law, Judy Steele, told the newspaper.

Judy Steele told the paper that the bees swarmed when her father-in-law sprayed a hive the insects had built in the small home's fireplace.

Her husband, Richard Steele, was with his parents when the attack occurred, Judy Steele, told the Morning Star. He was also stung but was able to drive several miles to the nearest phone to call emergency services, she said. There is no cell phone service in the remote area, she said.

Jim Hogg County sheriff's deputies responded and told the paper they were able to get Myrtle Steele out of the house.

“We were getting stung in the process, but we were able to place a blanket over her and take her to an awaiting ambulance – we did what we could,” the paper quoted Deputy Reyes Espinoza as saying. William Steele died inside, Espinoza said.

Judy Steele said her mother-in-law was stung more than 300 times.

Espinoza told the paper the species of bee involved in the attack had not been identified and the hive had yet to be removed from the house.

Source = www.cnn.com

George Williams,
General Manager - Staff Entomologist

Pest Control, RI, Pest Control, MA 

Comcast Cable Box Comes With Cockroach Surprise - As Company is Sued For Very 'Buggy' Gear

Comcast is under fire in Illinois for installing buggy hardware -- literally. An Illinois resident says the company installed a set top box that came with a free cockroach infestation, and once installed resulted in the bugs "pouring out" into his home. When the user went to complain about the used device and his new friends, Comcast took several days to address the problem, the user going so far as to bring a bag of dead roaches into the Comcast office. While normally you'd think this was an isolated incident, Chicago's being sued by nearly a dozen current and former employees who say they were forced to install the "buggy" gear:

The employees claim they would find cockroaches crawling in and out of equipment, and in their lockers, trucks and equipment bags. They also claim the South Side facility had rats, a leaky ceiling and birds that flew in and out of the warehouse. The employees claim they saw cockroach eggs fall out of cable boxes that were supposed to be installed in customers’ homes. When an employee complained, the supervisor said, “just put the box in — you’re in Englewood. They’ll only have cable for a month. They won’t pay bills,” the suit said.

While Comcast was busily installing bug-infested equipment in low-income Illinois homes, the company was making great political hay from a low-income broadband offer most users can't get. "Comcast adamantly denies the allegations and will vigorously defend itself in court," a Comcast spokesman insists.

George Williams,
General Manager - Staff Entomologist

Pest Control, RI, Pest Control, MA 

Biofuel Cells May Turn Cockroaches into Cyborgs

The sugars in a cockroach's belly have been harnessed by a fuel cell and converted into electricity, a big step toward turning insects into cyborgs, scientists are reporting.

Once miniaturized to the point that the fuel cells are non-invasive to the cockroaches, they can be implanted to power sensors or recording devices, for example.

A rechargeable battery inserted along with the so-called biofuel cell would store the trickle of energy it generates, explained Daniel Scherson, a chemist at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.

"If you want to be futuristic, one may use the energy stored to try to control the neurological system of the cockroach and then you might be able to (control) the cockroach (with) a joystick," he told me.

Yes, in the future, that nasty cockroach scurrying across the kitchen floor might actually be a spy set loose by a nosy neighbor, or the CIA.

Sugar Fuel

The power supply for this fuel cell is food the cockroaches eat, avoiding the need for devices that harness electricity from movement, such as shoes that turn mechanical energy into electricity.

The fuel cell devised by Scherson's team uses a cascade of reactions by enzymes to convert energy stored as sugars into electricity.

The first enzyme breaks down the sugar trehalose, which cockroaches constantly produce from their food, into two simpler sugars.

A second enzyme oxidizes the simple sugars, releasing electrons that "can then be funneled together to electrodes where they are captured and delivered to oxygen," Scherson explained.

The team first tested the system on trehalose solutions, then inserted prototype electrodes into the belly of a female cockroach. It worked.

The biofuel cell produced a trickle of electricity — 0.2 volts. Full details on the system are published online in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Intermittent Tasks

Since the researchers don't want to load down a bug with a heavy fuel cell and impair its ability to move, they envision storing the energy up in a battery, then using that energy to perform tasks such as power sensors.

One potential application is to equip social insects such as bees or ants with sensors tuned to detect a dangerous chemical and send them out to the environment.

Periodically, the sensor would turn on and broadcast its finding, shutting down between broadcasts to allow the battery time to recharge.

Operating at 0.2 volts is enough power to send a message a few inches, according to Scherson, far enough that a message could be sent down a line of ants spying on a top-secret meeting in a park.

To get there, the researchers need to shrink their fuel cells so they can be fully implanted, find long-lasting materials to make them with so they don't breakdown inside the bugs' bodies, and build the signal transmitters.

All of this is in the realm of possibility, noted Scherson.

"People do wonderful things with circuitry."

George Williams,
General Manager - Staff Entomologist

Pest Control, RI, Pest Control, MA 

Insects Watch Skies to Navigate

How do insects such as butterflies, locusts and fruit flies navigate thousands of miles so precisely with only the unchanging sky in the foreground? Researchers now have an answer.

"If you go out in a field, lie on your back and look up at the sky, that's pretty much what an insect sees," said study co-author Michael Dickinson, a University of Washington biology professor. Peter Weir, doctoral student at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), and Dickinson examined the behavior of the fruit fly, in outdoor lighting conditions, to find answers, the journal Current Biology reports. They demonstrated that fruit flies, equipped with complex compound eyes, keep their bearings by using the polarisation pattern of natural skylight, some of them for thousands of miles, according to Caltech-Washington statement.

Demonstrating that fruit flies can navigate using cues from natural skylight makes it easier to use genetics to better understand the complex capability and exactly how it is implemented in the brain. For millennia, seafarers have depended on the sun to know their position in the world, but often the sun is not visible. Polarisation vision solves that problem, Dickinson said, because if there's even a small patch of clear sky in a fruit fly's very broad range of view, then the natural light patterns can provide location information.

George Williams,
General Manager - Staff Entomologist

Pest Control, RI, Pest Control, MA 

Scary Food Facts: Insects & Rodent Hairs In your food? The FDA Says It's OK

Scary Food Fact No. 1: FDA Allows Rodent Hairs And Bugs into Peanut Butter, and Beetle Eggs in Canned Asparagus

When dealing with produce that has been harvested from the field, it’s pretty difficult to ensure that every teeny tiny critter that may have hopped onto a leaf or a stem, or nibbled their way inside of a tasty fruit is removed before the produce is processed and sold to the consumer. And after all, if you eat a little maggot, insect larvae or even a smidgen of mammalian excreta, you’ll probably be just fine.

In fact, the FDA is so certain you won’t suffer any adverse effects from ingesting minuscule amounts of insects, or “excreta” or rodent hairs (well those rodents, they do get everywhere) that it has published a little booklet called the Defect Level Handbook that advises food manufacturers as to what amounts of contamination from (harmless) foreign material are acceptable. When it comes to frozen or canned asparagus, the maximum level of contamination is “10% by count of spears or pieces {that} are infested with 6 or more attached asparagus beetle eggs and/or sacs.”

With frozen broccoli, come in under an “average of 60 or more aphids and/or thrips and/or mites per 100 grams” and it’s all good. As for cinnamon bark, more than an “average of 1 mg or more {of} mammalian excreta per pound” will get you in trouble. And when it comes to peanut butter, manufacturers can turn a blind eye to an “average of 1 or more rodent hairs per 100 grams,” but no more.

George Williams,
General Manager - Staff Entomologist

Pest Control, RI, Pest Control, MA 

Research Examines Why Insects Give Us an Itchy Feeling

Why is it that seeing, discussing, or even just thinking about creepy crawlers makes us feel itchy all over? It turns out the experts aren’t sure, according to a story on MSNBC.com titled "Spiders! Ants! Did that make you itchy? Here's why”

University of Pennsylvania neuroscientist Dr. Wenqin Luo places the blame for phantom itch on memories of an itchy past. Thinking about bugs, she explains, might prompt memories of previous experiences – “itchy associations.”

Why, then, doesn’t thinking about injuries prompt our bodies to feel phantom pains?

Dr. Luo offers the following theory: “Compared with itch, pain is a serious protective mechanism that triggers avoidance behavior. Thus, the threshold to trigger a pain sensation may be much higher than that of itch.”

Basically: If our brains registered pain (a danger) as easily as they do itch (an annoyance), our bodies would be sent into constant states of false alarm.

Dr. Glenn J. Giesler, Jr., a neuroscientist from the University of Minnesota offers a slightly different guess as to the phantom itch culprit: Maybe our skin always experiences the tiny sensations capable of causing light itch – but we only notice them when we’ve already got itch (or its creepy crawly causes) on the brain.

“It is amazing to me how easy it is to induce itch in others,” says Giesler. “Whenever I give a talk on the topic, I am amused at the percentage of people in the audience who start scratching.”

“Perhaps,” he guesses, “the threshold for sensation of itch is lowered by thinking about it.”

Dr. Gil Yosipovitch is a professor of dermatology at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in North Carolina. He’s also the founder of the International Forum for the Study of Itch.

Source: MSNBC.com

George Williams,
General Manager - Staff Entomologist

Pest Control, RI, Pest Control, MA 

Loudest Animal on Earth is a Tiny Insect
Lion's roar? Whale's song? Ounce for ounce, this bug has them beat

It's a wee bug, but it makes a monster noise.

Commonly known in the U.S. as the "water boatman," the 2-millimeter-long insect produces a sound equivalent to sitting in the first row of a loud orchestra. For their size, they are the loudest living animal, say a team of researchers from Scotland and France.

"I met someone who does underwater recordings and they heard these sounds … and wondered what the sounds were and what was making them," said Dr. James Windmill at the Center for Ultrasonic Engineering at Glasgow's University of Strathclyde. "We figured it must be a larger bug."

Windmill and a colleague teamed up with Jerome Sueur, a biologist at the Natural History Museum in Paris, to study the bug. They presented their work this month at a conference in Glasgow.

The male water boatman produces the sound by rubbing body parts together, called stridulation, like a cricket chirping. The males do it to attract a female, of course, and have evolved over millions of years to be a loud "bunch of males trying to outdo each other," said Windmill.

The herbivorous bugs live in shallow water, less than a foot deep, but Windmill doesn't suggest people walk along the river banks expecting to hear a very loud sound. Ninety-nine percent of the sound is reflected back into the water, though the remaining 1 percent can be heard out of the water.

Scientists do not understand how such a loud sound can be made with body parts the width of a human hair. However, the insects have a bubble of air under their bodies they use to breathe underwater, and Windmill suspects they may use it to amplify the sound.

"I love the biology but I take the practical view that there is something we can take from it and learn from it," said Windmill. He is interested in studying how animals hear and produce sounds, to develop better technologies such as sonar and biomedical ultrasound.

"As an engineer, I get to learn something. The loudest thing on Earth is a creature people wouldn't expect, like a lion roaring or a whale singing. The loudest thing on this planet is this tiny insect."

Source = Chicago Tribune

George Williams,
General Manager - Staff Entomologist

Pest Control, RI, Pest Control, MA

Dreams About Insects: Dream Meanings Explained

Dreams about insects are a common theme at bedtime. If you or a loved one has been covering this ground at night, you may have questions about what it all might mean. As part of a Huffington Post series on dreams and their meanings, we spoke to Cynthia Richmond, author of "Dream Power," and frequent guest on shows like "Oprah" and "Dr. Phil," in Camp Verde, Ariz., to get expert advice about the meanings of dreams about spiders. Note: While dream analysis is highly subjective, this post might provide some insight into why this dream occurred or is recurring.

What do dreams about insects mean?

Richmond says each insect has its own associations. However, when dreaming about insects in general, the dreamer should ask herself what's been annoying or pestering her.

What can I learn about myself from dreaming about this subject?

The subject matter of your dream plays a big role in what you can learn about yourself, says Richmond. For true soul searching, think back to how the bugs were treated in your insect dream. "Often they are being swept under a rug or stepped on," explains Richmond. "That represents the dreamer wanting to ignore the annoyance or end it."

Are there any tricks to avoiding or inducing dreams about insects?

"The only real trick to not having a certain dream is to interpret and understand the meaning so your subconscious mind stops sending the symbol," notes Richmond. To dream about insects, visualize them before dozing off.

Beyond analysis, what cultural symbolism can be found in dreams about insects?

"In Egypt, the beetle is associated with immortality. Bees are associated in many cultures with hard work and organization, as well as producing sweetness, food and the substance of life," says Richmond.

Who tends to have dreams about insects most frequently?

Dreaming about insects is common among males and females of all ages.

What does it mean if I'm completely surrounded/overwhelmed by insects in a dream?

"If you are completely surrounded or overwhelmed by insects, you are probably so annoyed by something or someone that you are ready to freak out," Richmond tells us. "If you are phobic to the insect, you are either ready to overcome the phobia -- by facing it-- or something has pushed you to your limit."

Source: Huffington Post

George Williams,
General Manager - Staff Entomologist

Pest Control, RI, Pest Control, MA

All American pest roaches--like most American humans--were immigrants.

• Roaches wear their skeletons on the outside of their bodies.
• Cockroaches bleed white blood.
• Roach mouths work sideways.
• Roaches use their feelers as noses.
• Cockroaches have 6 legs and least 18 knees.
• Pregnant for life? It doesn't sound like much fun, but some female cockroaches mate once and are pregnant for the rest of their lives.
• No food for a month--not even a crumb? Roaches can go without eating for a month but will only live a week without water.

George Williams
General Manager - Staff Entomologist

Pest Control, RI, Pest Control, MA

Insects: Soggy Weather is Keeping Some Pests in Hiding, Many Using the Time to Reproduce

New Brunswickers aren't the only ones waiting out this spring's soggy weather indoors. Insects are hiding out in homes and offices too. And their company can carry serious consequences.

"Ants are the number one problem that people are having this time of year, no ifs, ands or buts," said Don McCarthy, president and owner of Braemar Pest Control.

The wet spring is driving ants into homes across the province as the water-weary critters look for food sources that are protected from the rain, he said. While some species of ants are only an annoyance, carpenter ants and European fire ants can cause serious problems.

"These little guys are very aggressive and will attack you and come after you for invading their turf," McCarthy said of fire ants. The invasive species first showed up in Maine during the 1940s and '50s, and have slowly made their way into the Maritimes, with infestations spiking noticeably in the last five years, he said.

"It's a problem that's only going to get worse," McCarthy said. Gardeners moving plants from nurseries to their home are spreading the fire ants around the region. He said the bugs are particularly bad in Halifax and Pictou, N.S., but there has been a growing number of infestations in Charlotte County and around Greater Saint John.

"There's also the potential there for ants to carry germs and spread disease," said Mike Heimbach of Able Pest Control. He said his company has received hundreds of calls over the last few weeks from people with the little insects in their homes.

The rain will lead to more headaches as the temperature rises in the coming months, said Greg Flynn, supervisor for Braemar in New Brunswick, as black flies, mosquitoes and other insects hatch out of pools of water left from the spring rain.

"We're going to have a bumper crop of earwigs," said Flynn. "Everything has been hiding in their holes and reproducing."

In Fredericton, authorities are wrestling with a city-wide bug problem, an infestation of a yet-to-be identified larva in lawns across town. Preliminary tests on the larvae show it is a relative of the European chafer beetle, a pest that is wreaking havoc in lawns in Ontario. The beetle isn't the biggest problem though, it's the skunks and raccoons that eat them.

"They dig up the lawn until it looks like a rototiller has gone through it," said Councillor Stephen Kelly, who raised the issue at a Community Services Committee meeting earlier this month. "Whatever it is, it's causing substantial damage at an alarming rate and control measures are needed."

Source; canadaeast.com

George Williams
General Manager - Staff Entomologist

Pest Control, RI, Pest Control, MA