RI, MA EHS Pest Control Blog

5 TIPS TO REDUCE TICK PRESSURE AROUND YOUR HOME

1. Mow the lawn to keep grasses and weeds short. Current guidelines recommend mowing every 1 to 2 weeks, depending on the season and how fast the grass is growing.

2. Ticks enjoy damp, dark places, and a cozy nest is a great place for them to hide. Remove bird nests and bird feeders from the lawn. Remove wood piles, as these not only serve as nests for tick-carrying rodents, they also can attract termites.

3. Fence your backyard to contain deer and other wildlife.

4. Mulch around swing sets, play areas and sand boxes.

5. Avoid including tick-harboring plants, like pachysandra and other low lying vegetation that provide shading close to the ground.

George Williams,
General Manager - Staff Entomologist

Pest Control, RI, Pest Control, MA 

Five Kids Swarmed by Yellowjackets

The five cousins, who range in age from 4 to 15, were stung while playing outside in some woods near a home

Five children, four boys and a girl ranging in age from about 4 to 15, were taken to Munroe Regional Medical Center with yellowjacket stings Tuesday afternoon.

The National Park Service provides this information:

Yellowjackets are small yellow-and-black-banded wasps that build nests in the ground or paper-like nests in trees. The colony will reach maximum size in late summer. Worker yellow-jackets are common around picnic areas where they forage for food.

In most people, a yellowjacket sting produces an immediate pain at the site of the sting. There will be localized reddening, swelling, and itching. Ice or analgesic creams often relieve the symptoms.

Some people experience an allergic reaction to yellowjacket venom. Allergic (anaphylactic) shock can be fatal if untreated.

Yellowjackets are small, yellow and black banded wasps that build nests in the ground or paper-like nests in trees.

The colony will reach maximum size in late summer.

Worker yellowjackets are common around picnic areas, where they forage for food.

In most people, a yellowjacket sting produces an immediate pain at the site of the sting.

There will be localized reddening, swelling and itching.

Ice or analgesic creams often relieve the symptoms.

Some people experience an allergic reaction to yellowjacket venom.

Allergic (anaphylactic) shock can be fatal if untreated.

Deonte Jackson, a 19-year-old relative of the children, said the children were playing in the woods about 30 to 35 yards behind a home at 16375 NW Gainesville Road.

All of a sudden they started running to a nearby house.

When they came inside, Jackson said, their shirts and upper bodies were covered with live yellowjackets.

Others of the stinging insects — a variety of wasp — followed the children inside the home.

Adults in the home stripped the children of their clothes and sprayed them with bug spray.

They continued spraying the yellowjackets and stomping on them, Jackson said.

Meanwhile the insects kept stinging the children.

He said a 6-year-old girl and a 4- or 5-year-old boy were stung the worst.

Marion County Fire Rescue spokeswoman Miranda Iglesias said the two younger children were stung at least 30 times each.

People in the home called 911 at about 4:33 p.m.

Fire Rescue responded, and the children were rushed to Munroe Regional.

Later, bunches of yellowjackets could be seen swarming around a hole in the ground about a foot and a half wide.

Source = marion times

George Williams,
General Manager - Staff Entomologist

Pest Control, RI, Pest Control, MA 

Mosquitoes Fester with Momentum

It’s mosquito season again, and the little blood-suckers are back with a vengeance.

A rainy, wet spring mixed with warm summer temperatures provided perfect breeding conditions for the insects, and the pest experts at EHS say they are bracing for a busy year as the mosquito population booms.

“It’s already one of the worst seasons we’ve seen in awhile,” stated EHS customer service.

Rivers swelled past its banks with spring snow melts, surrounding areas became saturated, creating larger viable areas for mosquitoes to breed.

More areas are wet, and that opened up breeding sites just about everywhere causing EHS to find mosquitoes in areas we haven’t seen before.

Usually the mosquito population peaks in the beginning weeks of June in MA + RI.

EHS strongly urges residents to use insect repellents with DEET whenever they are outdoors. Additionally, residents should cover skin when outside, eliminate standing water in their yards and limit the outdoors at dusk and dawn, which are peak hours for mosquito activity.

For people who choose to lounge outside in the summer, EHS recommends warding off the insects with repellents that can be applied to grass and foliage.

EHS has created a “Take Back My Yard” program for mosquito control and the results have been amazing! We offer both a low impact treatment and a certified organic option. Bottom line is that we give people back the quality of life that mosquitoes take away.

George Williams,
General Manager - Staff Entomologist

Pest Control, RI, Pest Control, MA 

Bug Bombs No Match for Bed Bugs, OSU Research Reports

Over-the-counter "foggers" or "bug bombs" may do little to kill bed bugs if they're already infesting your home, according to new research from scientists at The Ohio State University.

Over-the-counter "foggers" or "bug bombs" may do little to kill bed bugs if they're already infesting your home, according to new research from scientists at The Ohio State University.

The study appears in the June 2012 issue of the Journal of Economic Entomology, a peer-reviewed publication of the Entomological Society of America. "There has always been this perception and feedback from the pest-management industry that over-the-counter foggers are not effective against bedbugs and might make matters worse," Susan Jones, an urban entomologist with the university's Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center and a household and structural pest specialist with Ohio State University Extension, said in a prepared statement.

"But up until, now there has been no published data regarding the efficacy of foggers against bedbugs."

Here's what the study, in part, concluded, according to the news release: Jones and research associate Joshua Bryant evaluated three different fogger brands obtained from a nationwide retailer, all of which have pyrethroids as their active ingredient. Only one of the foggers is specifically labeled against bedbugs. The other two are labeled for use against flying and crawling pests in homes, but can be used to treat bedbugs in many states, Jones said.

Experiments were conducted in three rooms in a vacant office building on Ohio State's Columbus campus. The researchers used five different bedbug populations collected from homes in Columbus between 2010 and 2011. Additionally, they included the Harlan strain -- which has been laboratory-raised since 1973 and is susceptible to pyrethroids -- as a control.

George Williams,
General Manager - Staff Entomologist

Pest Control, RI, Pest Control, MA 

Lady Gaga Designs Mad Live Cockroach Hat

The singer has instructed her designers to come up with a hat filled with cockroaches.

She’s grown fond of the insects since being informed of a study which proved they respond to her music more than songs by any other artist.

A source said: “Lady Gaga has been looking to top her famous meat dress for some time — and this could be it.

“She dubbed cockroaches ‘My real life monsters’ after hearing of the recent study.

“Now she wants to incorporate them in a headpiece by having them crawling around inside a netted cage.”

Last year students in New York, who were studying the engineering and movements of cockroaches, played music to the insects to get them moving after they failed to respond to electric pulses.

After material from Weezer and heavy metal group Avenged Sevenfold bombed, Gaga’s hits sparked them into life.

At least this headwear will be one of the cheapest in her massive collection.

A box of cockroaches shouldn’t set her designers back too much at her local pet shop.

Wearing the creepy crawly-filled hat is also handy preparation should her career nose-dive and she ends up in a future series of I’m A Celebrity . . . Get Me Out Of Here. I’d love to see her in the jungle alongside Michael Owen, Stavros Flatley and Lindsay Lohan.

Meanwhile, Gaga suffered concussion on stage in New Zealand after a dancer cracked her over the head with a pole.

She didn’t let the accident cut short her sell-out show though, and completed 16 more songs.

She told her audience: “I want to apologise. I did hit my head and I think I may have a concussion but don’t you worry, I will finish this show.”

The dancer must have seen a cockroach.

Source: www.thesun.co.uk

George Williams,
General Manager - Staff Entomologist

Pest Control, RI, Pest Control, MA 

Bed Bugs and Alcohol Don’t Mix, says UNL Researcher

New research from the University of Nebraska suggests bed bugs don’t have much taste for boozy blood and lay fewer eggs when their feedings contain alcohol.

New research suggests bed bugs don’t have much taste for boozy blood and lay fewer eggs when their feedings contain alcohol.

This penchant for a sober meal could mean fewer bites for hosts who imbibe, a New York entomologist now studying at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln found.

“(Bed bugs) need a blood meal to grow and to molt and to reproduce,” Ralph Narain, the University of Nebraska Ph.D. candidate from Suffolk County, told the website LifesLittleMysteries.com. “And one of their main hosts are humans, and we consume a lot of (alcohol).”

Narain fed blood mixed with different levels of alcohol to groups of the bugs in his lab and presented his findings to the National Conference on Urban Entomology in Atlanta last month.

The bed bugs that fed on clean blood reportedly doubled their body mass and laid an average of 44 eggs each.

The more alcohol the bugs received, the less they grew. Those that drank blood laced with the most alcohol grew only 12.5 percent and laid only a dozen eggs, Life’s Little Mysteries reported.

George Williams,
General Manager - Staff Entomologist

Pest Control, RI, Pest Control, MA 

Hantavirus Claims Two Lives

Two Utahns died last month from hantavirus, the first confirmed cases of the year and first fatalities from the virus since 2009, say health officials, the Salt Lake Tribune reported.

"We usually have about one case a year. Sometimes they survive and sometimes they don’t," said JoDee Baker, an epidemiologist at the Utah Department of Health. "But to have two fatalities so early in the season was why we wanted to get the word out."

Officials will not release the names of the deceased. Both were adults between the ages of 20 and 65. One lived in Millard County and the other in Salt Lake County, but it’s unclear where they were infected.

"We know they had rodent exposure," because that’s how the virus is spread, she said."We just don’t know where. We’re still investigating."

Summer is peak season for hantavirus, which is carried predominantly by deer mice in North America.

George Williams,
General Manager - Staff Entomologist

Pest Control, RI, Pest Control, MA 

HELP!!!! MY ENTIRE GARAGE FLOOR IS CRAWLING WITH INSECTS!!!!

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That was the frantic phone call we got into our office. I get there to do the inspection and the customer was right, there were a TRILLION insects all over the garage floor! What were they? Upon examining them they were grain beetles. Why in the garage? Now come the probing questions to the homeowner……Do you have bird seed stored here? NO. Dog food? NO. Grass seed? NO. Any type of food or seed? NO

Time to play Columbo and investigate the “crime scene”. Sure enough I see some beetles raining down from a shelf in the back of the garage. I move some items away and there it is, a 10LB box of dog biscuits! The husband confesses that he bought them at a big box store over a year prior because they had a deal on them. There were two boxes and they were so big and bulky that he stored one box in the garage and forgot about it. So I used my HEPA vacuum and physically removed all the beetles then treated the area and most importantly threw away the epically infested box of dog biscuits. Just look at all some of the beetles in the Ziploc bag and the damage they did to the bones.

Mike “Spike” McGoldrick
Service Supervisor
Environmental Health Services, Inc.

Pest Control, RI, Pest Control, MA 

Sometimes pest control can be totally natural. No rodenticide or traps needed. Just good old fashioned labor mixed in with a healthy helping of know-how. In many cases the best solution is a one-time only exclusion service.

click images to enlarge

Keep pests out so they move elsewhere. At EHS we only use stainless steel because we know other materials will corrode over time. This is just another reason why EHS is the best at what they do!

Frank Diaz
Service Specialist
Environmental Health Services, Inc.

Pest Control, RI, Pest Control, MA 

When it comes to battling bedbugs in your home, business, condo, school, hospital, apartment complex, etc. there is ONLY one choice and that is EHS!

Environmental Health Services, Inc. is widely known as an industry leader at bedbug elimination.

George Williams,
General Manager - Staff Entomologist

Pest Control, RI, Pest Control, MA