Pest Geek Podcast

We’re going to be discussing alates now what are alates. Well alates are basically insects that have wings. So it’s a winged insect. You know like flies, bees, wasps, even ladybugs have wings. But what happens is there are some insects that have wings and don’t fly. Other insects grow wings and then lose them. And these are the ones that freak out a lot of people out. Alate Insect Pest That Have Wings For instance German roaches have wings but they don’t fly. Now the your close cousin the Asian cockroach which looks almost identical has wings and does fly and they can live outside the German Roach doesn’t live outside. They’re primarily a domestic pest. Now you have the American cockroach which is known as a palmetto bug. Well that one has wings and that one does fly. And if you’ve ever come in contact with one of them and they start flying you start freaking out. Insects That Become Alate or Grow Wings But we have to understand that there are also insects like ants that produce wings and these are known as alates and they will produce these wings when they’re ready to mate. They will leave the nest and they will fly away to mate with other queens so male and females will mate knowing what are known sometimes as nuptial flights. Well guess what. Termites also have this ability. They’re known as termite swarms. And if you’re different times of the year there’s gonna be different swarms in different parts of the country depending upon the termite that’s there. Flying Ant Alates Vs Termites Now a lot of people get freaked out because what happens is they think they have termites when they actually have ants that are just performing nuptial flights. And here in South Florida we have a lot of these ants that at different times of the year will do this crazy and we’ll do it. We will have carpenter ants that will do it. We have a go stance that we’ll do it and people think they’re calling us and saying we have gnats we have fungus gnats. And what they have is an actual just flight a nuptial flight of these alates. So there’s a lot of people that are calling and they’re confused and they don’t know. Well guess what. The best thing to do is take a picture of it and send it to your local pest control company or send it to your local university or entomology program and they can quickly I.D. this for you. But most of the time we’re getting calls like out with crazy ant and they’re flying around and they’re getting in through the windows. And what can you do about alates. Well actually you can do very little because you can’t control them when they’re in this flying mode because they’re technically right now a flying in seconds like trying to control flies outside when they’re flying all over the place very very difficult to do. So what you’ve got to understand is get a get a good id know that you have an ant versus having a termite and know what time of the year the termites swarm.Now there are basically four termites around the country. You have the foremost in termite the subterranean termite. The dry wood termite and the damp wood termite. Now here in Florida we have an exception where we have a high bred termite which is a combination of the Asian subterranean termite and the foremost and termite which was discovered I believe in 2012. And there’s very good information on that online by the University of Florida and IFAS which will give you the details on that but knowing this and knowing that there certain types of insects that will get wings and then they will drop them once they’re done mating will help you determine if you have one or the other. The other thing that we want to discuss is that a lot of these insects when they drop their wings those wings are used by the colony as ...

Hey welcome back to this edition of the pestgeek podcast. I am your host Frank Hernandez and I wanted to address the issue on this podcast about the DIY pest control Craze that is happening in America with distributors who are specifically positioned to sell directly to homeowners and the abundance of pest control people that are really up in arms about the ability for homeowners with no Pesticide training, no PPE training, no taxonomy education, no insect biology, no chemical understanding of the fate of these pesticides in the environment, no understanding of bees and pollinators and how it affects them how it contaminates soil water streams air. The Legality of Misusing Pesticides By Homeowners How they are putting these products in their homes who are designed for to be put only outside and they’re putting them in their home. And if we would do as pest control operators the things that most homeowners do We would end up in jail period. We would be fined convicted and then up in jail. How many homes do I walk into in my business where there is the roach powder in the corner All over the place all over the cabinets Roach tablets thrown everywhere where a kid can pick it up and eat it the station thrown on top of that and there is the bottle of the over-the-counter spray that they’ve been spraying all over their counters and everywhere contaminating every surface in that home and then they asked me is the product that I’m gonna put toxic. The Marketing Of Pest Control Vs The Ability Of Capable Technicians The idea is that if you can buy it over the counter in people’s minds the product has to be safe. See the marketing is phenomenal and this is what the small pest control operator doesn’t understand about marketing. He is a capable technician able to solve pretty much any problem and he is totally dependent in his mind that the ability the knowledge that he has is more important. Then the marketing and what people think pest control is and this is where the industry has been a problem. For decades is that everyone thinks that what we do is so easy they can do it themselves. People That Hire Professional Pest Control Companies Don’t Do it Themselves As a matter of fact most people will hire me to clean up the mess to clean up the big pest control problem they have. And then when they realize that all we’re doing is an exterior service preventing most of the problems they say well I can do that myself. I don’t need you after this. And they don’t realize that they’re dealing with major major insect problems that the pest pressure is so high that unless they actually know what that pest biology is they’re going to end up in the same situation within the next three to four months and they’ll call us back but here’s another reality that pest control people fail to understand. I was trying to look up the article and I couldn’t find it but basically two or three years ago I looked up the numbers and ORKIN in published an article I believe it was in PCT magazine where they said hey look we’ve got the data for the last 50 years. I mean you’re talking about the world’s largest pest control company OK. And they’ve got more data than you and I will ever compile in the next hundred years on human behavior

Steven Vantassel here wildlife control consultant with another episode of living the wildlife. Today I want to talk about where you could find some helpful resources that would assist you in training your workers or training yourself even the management of various species of wild in the wildlife damage management field. In the beauty of it is it’s that it’s no additional cost. No I say no additional cost because some of these items have been paid for already by your tax dollars. These USDA Bulletins Paid For By Tax Dollars Get The Best Return On Your Investment It’s one of my pet peeves when people think that something that the government does and people call it free it’s not free. Americans have a really naive notion about what the government actually does and what it costs to talk about what the government does we think the government does things for free it doesn’t do things for free. It’s paid for by taxpayers. The point is is that we treat it like it’s free even though it’s not because we don’t have to pay for it again because we’re already paying for it. And so nothing my little conservative diatribe there but I think it’s an important point whenever a politician tells you that this is free. They’re lying to you. And that needs to speak about they’re either A they’re intelligence or b their integrity or c both. In any event this particular item is part of the. Wildlife Damage Management Technical Series by the U.S. Department of Agriculture Let me talk about what this source of information is. It’s the wildlife damage management technical series. And it’s produced by the U.S. Department of Agriculture Animal Plant Health Inspection Service and specifically Wildlife Services. Now if you’re not familiar with that organization or that agency Wildlife Services is a federal agency under the U.S. Department of Agriculture. And their job is to assist in the management of wildlife species that are in conflict with human interests or are threatening endangered species or are posing a potential health and disease threat. So they’re also involved in like for example protecting aircraft from bird strikes from animal strikes. They’re involved in various forms of studies involving a zoo not Nordic diseases like rabies and they’re also controlling feral hogs and chi Oates and prairie dogs depending on what state you’re in and what they’re involved with. Animal Rights Activists At Odds With Wildlife Control Operators So without getting too much into some of the political side of things there a hated organization because a lot of animal rights protest groups course like to be beat up on them. And of course some of our wildlife control operators as well are not happy with Wildlife Services because some of them see wildlife services as a competitor to private industry. So they are certainly an organization under siege. So whether you love them or hate them you should understand that a portion of wildlife service is about 10 percent of their budget. From what I understand is dedicated to research and so that is the NAF part of that is part of the National Wildlife Research Center in Fort Collins Colorado. Now they do some fine work at that at that agency. So if you decide to hate Wildlife Services for whatever

And now for today’s topic I got on the phone Jim Gorman corporate V.P. of Marketing for Nisus Corp.. Hey welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. Yeah man. So I understand a lot of things are going on. You guys are getting hit with the floods and a lot of homes are getting damaged. And you know we talk you know you’ve got you’ve contacted us about discussing what you guys could do to help. And a lot of guys are going to probably be hurting and you know being on hold for some of this stuff and what you guys can do for them. So I think it’s an awesome opportunity. Just tell us a little bit about you and a little bit about your company. Nisus Corporations is Americas Premier New Home Pre Treatment Solution That way people who don’t know about you can know well Nisus corporations has been around since 1989 and our first product was born here and more care was developed as a log home preservative and then the inventor by Dietrich found that it killed insects and killed termites and so he registered it as pesticide. And as you know today Boracare is the number one termite pre treatment in the nation. We’ve probably got about a 45 percent market share of new construction homes that are treated using Boracare. And so far it’s been a great right. Now we have a full line of products for pest control. We have a division that sells chemicals into the wood preservation industry. So we have copper naphtha Nate that is a replacement for Creosote and pentacle or a phenol. And so we have that and we’re starting hopefully we’ll start another division this year. So that’s kind of exciting. Nisus has been part of the flood recovery effort So but Nisuss has been part of the flood work really since Katrina. And our company was on the ground after the Ninth Ward flooded and training pest companies how to go in and disinfect because as you know when there’s flood waters those flood waters are not just nice clean water that it’s they’ve got a lot of toxic elements in you know grudges flood all sorts of things that you know release things into that flood water. And you also have a high level of E. coli and things like that. So one of the things that we saw is that people didn’t understand that they really needed to protect themselves when they were doing clean out and they needed to disinfect the structure. So we talked pest control companies to do that. Then we showed them how to apply borer care with mold care which kills mold and helps prevent mold from growing back to the structure to the wood in the structure. And then of course whenever there’s a flood termite treatments have to be reapplied as well. So we we have gone down into these areas and you know starting with Katrina there was a number of companies down there who’s really lost the majority of their customers and they didn’t have things for their employees to do. And so by getting this program setting up and helping them help their community rebuild we were able to help these companies put their employees back to work and we’ve had a couple of guys tell us that you know we really saved their companies. So but then as the you know more floods came. Baton Rouge was another one and we were down there in Houston we were down there and Knoxville has had some flooding in the last week or so just from a heavy rain event. We’ve got a small number of house is flooded compared you know like maybe 800 homes that have been flooded. But it was you know we probably had one hundred

We’re going to go ahead and discover why most people are having trouble getting disease control or why others aren’t giving control at all. Let’s look at this. We have to look at the science. This is purely about science and facts. There are two things in the pest control marketplace science, facts and marketing. And the problem is that most people are given to marketing and believing what they read versus doing the actual reading about what the pesticide product really does. Now let’s take a look at this. What do we need to have a disease in a garden. We need three things. Basically you need the plant to be present. You also need the host of the pathogen that attacks to host the plant that’s present to be there and then you need an environmental trigger that causes the disease to become active. But the disease is already there. This happens in two different methods. One of them is what is known as a soil borne disease meaning the disease is always in the soil. It is always present. You can’t inoculate it and you can’t eradicate it. It’s always there. It’s always going to be there. The way you have to think about this is a disease that when the right triggers happen it becomes alive. But it’s always there. So there is no such thing as anybody who is going to eradicate them. All right. So what do we got to look at. Now we have three things that needed for the plant. And there’s two things the soil borne and the disease becomes either active or inactive. All right. So now we’ve got to look at understanding what type of control can you get. And there is two things that you need to understand that are technical terms but there are also legal terms and that is control and suppression and you might be thinking for yourself. I don’t want to get suppression. I want to get control for my client. The client is thinking I didn’t hire you to suppress it or to bring it down or reduce it. I hired you to control it. And the reality is that in some cases you will have no choice but to only offer suppression. We’re going to discuss what are the things that causes us to not get control. Well the number one thing is cultural practice. What is cultural practice. It is your mowing your mowing height mowing frequency is the mowing with a sharp blade. Does the person doing the mowing understand how to properly treat that machine to prevent it from spreading a disease to other gardens and then also irrigation. Are you irrigating at the right amount at the right time of day and in the right frequency to not cause the disease to see the wrong mowing waiting too long is gonna help get disease cutting that lawn to short is going to cause it to get a disease because they get stressed it makes it more susceptible. And if you don’t have a sharp blade and you’re shredding the lawn Well it makes it more susceptible if the disease is present. What we talk about in professional pest control is professional integrated pest management without integrated pest management. We can’t do our job. Think of it this way. You go to your doctor and you tell your doctor tells you you’ve got diabetes. Well you’re eating fast food out. You’ve got a sedentary lifestyle.  You’re not exercising and you’re eating sweets.

Stephen Vantassel here wildlife control consultant. Wanted to talk today about L.D. 50 and understanding LD 50 as motive. Many of you know I’m involved in vertebrate control so the role of pesticides to control vertebrates raises a lot of issues and concerns about the relative toxicity of some of these toxic loans fume against that are being used to control unwanted pest vertebrates. So let’s back up a little bit and talk about the relationship between notions of risk and harm. Now on another podcast I would kind of been deep in the notion of risk here, I’m not gonna go as far deep into that as before but I do want to give you concept to help you understand the difference between understanding risk and understanding what harm is. Because these are two different concepts. Risk is the probability or the potential for a negative event or the probability of harm that something bad is going to happen harm. The concept of harm is what is the actual effect of that negative event so risk is the potential. The likelihood that something bad is going to happen harm is it is an analysis or discussion of what that actual negative event actually is. So when we’re talking about LD 50. We really focusing in we’re drilling down on this notion of harm. What is this. What is the harmful Effects of this particular toxic and or fumigate or many of your cases because many of you deal with bugs of this particular pesticide. So let’s kind of drill into that a little bit now if you’re heard by other podcast you would have heard me talk about how hazard or risk is exposure times toxicity. And so we’re going to be focusing not on the exposures side but we’re going to be focusing on the toxicity side. That’s that that harm element of this particular toxicity. How lethal is this particular element. And even under toxicity we have to be breaking it down a little bit more. Our focus is going to be on its lethality not the toxicity in terms of its persistence. That’s a different question. We’re looking at the acute effects of the problem not the long term effects. Now acute effects are typically defined in pesticide use as what the effect of a pesticide is that occurs within twenty four hours Long. The long term effects are beyond 24 hours in some cases some pesticides may have effects for years. But when we’re dealing with LV 50s we’re looking at acute toxic effects. All right so let’s kind of talk about Understanding relative toxicity. Now L.D. 50 which stands for Lethal Dose 50 percent it’s symbolized as capital L capital D with a subscript number of 50 Five 0. That’s typically how it sits it’s so we call it L.D. 50 Lethal Dose 50 percent. Now what it is it’s a a formulaic way to give a number to how potentially lethal this particular product is and it’s often given in the sense of milligrams per kilogram. How much is needed to kill 50 percent of the test subject. So if you have 20 animals how many how much of the dose at a 50 milligram per kilogram rate do you need to kill 50 percent of those animals which would be in this case 10 so let’s talk about milligrams and kg so a milligram is one millionth Of a kilogram. Now if you’re trying to we know

Hey folks this is Frank and I’m back. That’s right I’m back on the pest geek podcast,  And in case you’ve been wondering a lot of people been wondering where I’ve been. Well I’ve been right here. I just haven’t been there and I don’t have any of you remember this show for kids. It was called Where in the World is Carmen San Diego. Yeah. I mean where have I been. Well I’ve been building my company learning to recruit and hire people and it would have been a ride for the last three years four years since I started this new company, And I’ll do a little recap for those of you who don’t know who I am because a lot of you don’t listen way back. I mean we’ve got over two hundred and twenty episodes now of the pest geek podcast and a lot of you have no idea who I am or where I come from but I’ve been silent for a year. The podcast has been going thank you to Jeff McGovern and Stephen Vantassel and Adam Malanga for helping out and contributing what they have. They’ve done a phenomenal job and they will continue to do this. And I really do appreciate all of the work they’ve put into this to make sure and they you know they they’ve captured the vision of what I want to do where I want to go with this. They have embraced the vision have supported me have consulted me have given me great advice. They’ve been there for me so I am surrounded by excellent people who actually have been doing this all of them probably longer than I have and have in their own right their own expertise. And that’s why I appreciate that they’re totally different from me. They’re not me. They’re a totally different people with different backgrounds different skill sets different abilities and I think that’s what makes a very very successful team. His not having people who are a copy of me but experts in their own right. So I am so grateful for that. But yes I took a year off from the doing an actual producing a podcast. I’ve been just behind the scenes doing the the distribution and production work but not doing the actual content creation for the podcast because my business blew up and I could not handle it anymore to the point where I had my wife for a year doing preventive service while I was managing the business doing sales marketing and doing initials and doing the lawn and garden work that is very extensive. And I went from working six hours a day in the field to eight hours a day in the field to 10 hours a day in the field to 12 and 14 hours. I mean I would be out at 7 o’clock in the morning and I’d still be doing a restaurant at 12:00 midnight. That’s how crazy it got and I had to build a buffer in order for me to start hiring because it requires a lot of preparation and knowing that the numbers are gonna be there so that you can make payroll and for so I you know I took on everything else and put all the GHB preventive maintenance which is our growing part of our business and handed that over to her and had her in the field for about six hours a day doing that until I building a business to start recruiting.The problem here I had was Listen guys. I didn’t know how to recruit and the way I had done it in the past In my previous part of this business which you know this is this is a brand new rebrand of my old company where we were a landscape company...

On this edition we’re going to be discussing Trophallaxis. Now what is Trophallaxis? Well Trophallaxis is actually kind of a little sick deal that insects have going on. It’s kind of a their own little secret and well it’s basically when insects take food and they regurgitated back and feed it to their young or share it among nest mates. Yeah. And there’s two types of Trophallaxis. It gets worse because there’s mouth to mouth Trophallaxis and then there’s mouth to anus Trophallaxis. One is known as stomadeal. The other is well procodeal the term where we get proctologist which is another interesting career by itself. But anyway most eusocial insects are gonna do this habit they’re going to perform this. Ants roaches bees wasps termites they all practice this. And this is why it’s more effective sometimes to use baits rather than sprays to control a lot of these insects. Let’s look at roaches. Well they transmit it and they regurgitated back to their nymps. If you use a product like within indoxocarb. It’s great because it’ll transmit through the entire system including their feces for up to about four different stages. So this is what helps control roaches by knowing this behavior and have a little bit of different practice but they also practice Trophallaxis and they also practice Trophallaxis by spreading a scent throughout your trail known as a pheromon trail that helps him also identify their mates. So this is one of the ways they also use truffle axes. In the case of termites,  termites use Trophallaxis to feed it to their nymphs or their larvae throughout basically the entire colony. And this is why base stations in the ground to control subterranean termites is so effective. Now we have bees and wasps. Well not all wasps are bad, but wasps use Trophallaxis to share pollen that they collect because a lot of wasps are pollinators and they also have this behavior. Bees do the same thing bees do it when they bring a load back of pollen they can use it to transfer from worker to work or mouth to mouth to transport the pollen. Well this is a problem because if you’re using sprays in a landscape where there are bees present you could be contaminating all of the pollen that’s in the flower and when they’re taken it back they are collapsing the colony. Most modern products have label restrictions against spraying for bees when they are present. Let’s take a look at this. So here on the EPA Web site this is a law that was passed that basically all manufacturers had to comply with this and put this under label if they could prove that the insecticide when there was sprayed could be transferred back to the colony and kill it in the case of neonicotinoids. They’ve been under fire for many years,  including most big box stores have removed them completely from their shelves. And this is why we do not use in our practice any spraying with any neonicotinoids because of these challenges. Can you imagine we go to somebodies lawn or yard and say we can’t spray your yard today you have bees present. Well people would lose their mind. So we have to have sound practices in place to control this. But in this case the label says that new

Steven Vantassel I want to talk to you little about understanding risk. How do we talk about risk. How do you explain the chances of something going wrong to your clients who are afraid of what you’re going to be doing. I think this is one of the most difficult concepts. For pest control operators or wildlife control operators to discuss with their clients because the fact is we tend to exalt. The chances of something going wrong when we’re dealing with something we’re not familiar with. Take for example driving why does it that people think that driving is safer. Than flying. Even though we’ve all heard the statistics on since driving is infinitely more dangerous than flying. But people would rather drive than fly. Why is that. Well part of that is because. People are more familiar. With driving. Than they are with flying and so therefore there’s a sense of a loss of control. You have to trust the pilots up in the front of that plane. And when you don’t understand something you tend to exaggerate. And exalt the risk. But I also think there’s another element to it and that is people intuitively understand that when something goes wrong with a plane. The results tend to be rather catastrophic. You can have a lot of fender benders and cars and no one’s getting killed. But with a plane when something goes wrong it can go really wrong. We have to understand risk as the potential For how serious the effects are going to be even if those risks are are my Newt or extraordinarily rare people tend to take less risk when the consequences are severe. So there’s a psychological component. Let me back up a little bit and let’s talk about risk. Many of you have probably had risk explained to you as. Rich as a formula. Sort of like risk equals. The toxicity times exposure. And that was your understanding of risk and that’s really a good. Thumbnail way of understanding. What risk is in terms of explaining to your client that is clearly if you’re using. You know an herbicide. That’s going to pose possibly less toxic ingredients to a human that PSA. Then let’s say using a rodent aside or a fume again that may be killing rodents. And then you’d have to just calculate. What level of exposure is this person going to have. So we could obviously reduce the risk by making sure the client’s not home. The item is dry before the client comes back. The reentry interval and that sort of thing. But there’s more to risk than simply that because giving some of those concepts of risk no toxicity. Does your client really understand. Toxicity. Mean look at all the stuff that’s on the internet now that we’re poisoning ourselves. You know people are looking at well they found one billionth. Of a of a percentage of ingredients in something and therefore it’s contaminated make because the public doesn’t understand that there’s a difference between Presence of something and the significance of that presence. We have chemicals that were exposed to all over the place. The question is not just whether they’re there but is there. An actual effect or harm that we can measure. And the reality is a lot of these things is yeah we could find it we have testing equipment today they can find things down to the billionth. Part

Jeff McGovern the pest coach talks about getting into termite inspection shape for termite season. With the warm weather hopefully on the way. I see the weather reports up north and well it doesn’t look like it’s quite there yet. The ice and snow is still around but I guess as time passes the next few months everybody will have the joy of doing termite investigations once again. Course living here in Florida. That’s kind of stuff goes on all year round. But I don’t normally spend a lot of time in the termite arena. But I thought I’d make a few comments about that, and about that type of work in and of itself because it’s physically extremely demanding. When your older your body doesn’t cooperate very well And when you’re working in pest control, You know it doesn’t work well if the body doesn’t cooperate and when you’re involved in doing assessments and evaluations for termites or what some people call a termite inspections it beats the living daylights out of the body. But let’s let’s take a moment and look at this from a far more practical point of view. As we age we are not as mobile. We are not as supple. Oh yeah there’s some people that are but you know they all we’re all jealous of them. But the reality is we don’t work as well. We don’t move as well. And we’re a little bit slower. So let’s. Just imagine for a moment you’re in your living room or in your family room and you’ve got work coming up next week and you know it’s gonna be the first time you crawled around since maybe late last fall. It’s been a few months. You’ve been sedentary. Yeah. You’ve been doing some pest control work but the down and dirty grungy crawl under buildings and scaling through attics and such hasn’t been done for a little while because it’s just been too cold and too icy. Are you truly in shape for that and how can we tell. And how can we tell what type of protective equipment we really should have. You know there was a time. Back in the mid 1970s when I was just getting started in pest control that I could have crawled under the house and T-shirt and shorts that would’ve been fine. I was indestructible and could do anything that is not the case anymore and I have to be far more careful. We all do. But let’s say you know we’re in the living room in the family room this weekend and we want to find out just what kind of shape for it. Well hey good carpeting on the floor. You know it’s a it’s a nice nice afternoon. I’m going to try crawling around the living room crawling around family room cutout in your hands and knees and try that. How comfortable is that. Can you move all right. The thing is hurt because if they do it’s going to be far more magnified under the building. Now to find out how good a shape we’re really in. Maybe we should add a level of difficulty to this task. So most of us have kids and grandkids they have Legos. So maybe we should go get a bucket of legos randomly scattered those around the middle of the floor where we’re going to be crawling THEN LET’S TURN THE LIGHTS OUT. AND LET’S GET A FLASHLIGHT AND NOW LET’S TRY crawling through that room on our hands and knees and belly crawling with the

Steven Vantassel I will talk today about helping your clients understand when they should you call a wildlife control professional and how to know if the animal is possibly sick or diseased? When is the trigger point on when we as professionals need to act? Home Owner Pay For Wildlife Control Not The City Sometimes when clunk customers call and they’re wondering know they see a raccoon in the backyard and they’re worried about the safety of the children. Well I used to get a lot of these types of calls when I was doing fieldwork back in Massachusetts people would call about a raccoon they saw go through the yard and they were worried about the children so I would give them. Price the all of the sudden they would say well the children. Why isn’t the city taking care of this now. Sometimes I ask them you know aren’t your taxes high enough. And then once they realized that they had to pay personally for this type of work. The children became magically safe. So the reality is sometimes that people think something’s a danger if they think they can get a service done for free. But once they have to pay for it they realized they didn’t need it. After all. Animal Are on Your Property All The Time And the reality is they didn’t that people have to realize that there are raccoons cruising through their yard. On a probably a regular basis and they just happen to see one. So just because an animal is out during the day it’s typically nocturnal doesn’t necessarily mean. That the raccoon or skunk is necessarily disease could be. But there’s no guarantee of that because there’s a lot of particular reasons why any animal may be moving around. For example Female raccoons during the summer sometimes they get tired of the young and they get hot and they’ll actually come out onto a tree branch and just hang out. Maybe the female needs to. Go to a new area to move her young. And sometimes you don’t know if an animal has been disturbed from its den and its leaving that location in broad daylight not because it wants to but simply because the conditions that it was under were too intolerable It felt threatened and it needed to move on. So the point is this how do you help people understand when they need to act when is it appropriate to call a wildlife control professional to come and remove An animal. This is where we have to get into the issue of animal behavior. And so a lot of people tend to think that well it’s out during It’s a nocturnal animal like a raccoon. It’s out during the daytime therefore it must be rabid not true. And certainly I hope none of the listeners of this particular podcast. Try to. Exploit that concept that mythology because it’s simply not true. Now it could be true but there’s no guarantee of that. And again I gave you some illustrations earlier as to why that would be the case. Some Clues An Animal Could Be Sick Or Diseased But there is a situation when an animal is looks like it’s trembling shaking. Walking in circles. Disoriented. It looks unhealthy by the way it’s limping perhaps. Excuse me. It may also be a situation where the raccoon is or the skunk. Is it simply looks like it has crusty Nissen its eyes.

And now for today’s topic a welcome to the pest geek podcast. I am Frank Hernandez your pest geek. And we’re going to be discussing Thigmotactic Insects and what are Thigmotactic Insects? These are insects that like to have their body touching something they’re touchy feely insects they like to feel protected and just like two thirds of their body touching things. Now there are many insects that are Thigmotactic. Thigmotaxis is the act of touching. Now these insects include roaches, silverfish firebrats, rodents even thrips in your landscape will hide in the bark of trees during the winter to survive. Also these insects will do as in during winter months they will huddle together to stay warm. So these are many defense mechanism that insects use one to protect themselves and where they like to live. Understanding this behavior is going to help you control insects in a better way than trying to use broadcast methods. For instance if you know that a German Roach is a Thigmotatic pest and it likes to hide in places like cracks and crevices. Now think of your kitchen. You have thousands of cracks and crevices in those cabinets. That’s where they are. And by putting foggers and using aerosols you’re not going to control that problem because they’re hiding and protecting themselves even from those pesticides even if they’re up in the air. So what you need to do is locate nesting this is why gell bait putting them directly in the areas where they are finding those locations getting a flashlight looking for where the roaches are hiding and putting the product right there in front of their faces is going to be very effective if you understand this also about roaches. Where do people go to go get boxes to move when they want to move. They go dumpster diving or they go to the local store. Well what happens is since those insects have those habits cardboard has those little notches which are the corrugate  and in between those two layers of paper there’s a corrogate and they love hiding in there so to silverfish so to firebrats and what happens is they go hide in there you come home you pack all your stuff you move and you’re moving roaches. So by not doing that you’re going to go ahead and prevent a possible roach infestation in your home. Do yourself a favor buy the boxes from a reputable vendor. All right. So now what silverfish why is this important to understand this about silverfish. Well silverfish have this habit too and they’re these little packets that they’re called Dekko packs which have boric acid in them. And what happens is since the fish loves to go in that little cardboard they go in there and they encounter the boric acid. Well if you’ve got silverfish in your cabinets in your drawers and you’re storing your clothes and you’re finding them in there you put the little silver fish packs you’re going to eliminate a major problem with silver fish in those drawers because they’re gonna find it. Caulk and Sealing to Prevent Thigmotactic Pests Also if you understand about caulking and sealing if you call can then you prevent those pests from having to go in there it’s much easier to caulk seal your baseboards one time in your life than to constantly

Ok so in this training we’re discussing tramp ants and what is so important about tramp ants. The fact that these guys are the seven most common invaders of homes in the U.S. and they have six characteristics that are primary to understanding why they’re so difficult to control and why it is that most people fail at it. Why are they called Tramp ants. So let’s take a look at this. Why are they called Tramp ants? Well, tramp ants are ants that are going on ships, cargos, and trucks and they move into continents by basically hitchhiking. Because they invade properties and they invade structures so easily they easily hitchhike onboard anything they can find and then they come into our country and they’re known as an exotic invasive. Now what happens is that most people don’t understand insect biology. They don’t understand that these insects all have different behaviors but they got six common characteristics and we’re going to start looking at each and the most common ones that we find in homes so that you can understand if you have one of these ants you’re better be prepared for a different type of tactic. 7 Tramp Ant Species The first one is the Argentine ant now this and is one of the most difficult I mean these are the seven most difficult and to controlling the world. They tend to like more of a Mediterranean climate. So you’re going to find these in an abundance in places like California. So that’s going to be a big issue of you’re in California and you’re dealing with these ants. You’ve got to be prepared that your traditional quarterly service might not be adequate to control these types of species. Now we’ve got big head ant now over here if you look on the side you see there’s a big headed and most people don’t see this one. They think they got like fire ants or something that they’re going to get bitten, minor worker are the abundant ones little tiny ones. The major workers are not always out and what happens is when you start being effective and collapsing this entire colony what happens is that these little guys go away you start finding them dead everywhere and then you start seeing these big headed ones more and more. That’s how you know the colonies collapsing because you start seeing the major workers having to come out and work for a living. So go figure. Now the crazy ant well the crazy ant is known for being crazy because of its sporadic movement, what it does is it walks all over the place really fast into really quick and very sporadic very rarely will you see trails. And it’s also known as the Longhorn crazy ant because of its type of antenna. That’s one of the ways to identify it that you have also a crazy ant. Most people confuse it with the white footed ant because they’re black they tend to look black but the white footed and is a more robust and it’s a very slow moving and it tends to move up and down it doesn’t move across trails on the ground you’re usually going to see it moving up a wall or across a soffitt or fascia board because you have them in the attic and they love to go up they love to go up palm trees up trees everywhere there’s trees they’re going to want to go there they’re, crazy ant doesn’t do that it pretty much goes everywhere crazy and it’s a very difficult and to control. All right. So we’ve got the ghost ant now and this is a little tiny sucker that’s probably the smallest of them all.

Stephen Vantassel is going to talk today about. House mice. A lot of you are probably dealing with house mice But maybe you’re having situations where you’re just not getting the level of control that you want. And my suspicion is a part of this is due to the fact that we don’t have a full appreciation of all of the aspects and abilities capable of house mice. House mice are amazing creatures. And so what I found when I give presentations is that a lot of people don’t really know or don’t really fully appreciate how much physical abilities. Mouse actually have. Getting Reacquainted With What House Mice Can Do So I wanted to give you a little bit of data here. Maybe some of this will be a refresher for those of you but if that’s the case it’s never hurts to read get reacquainted with what this mouse can do as well as for those of you don’t know. And this will be a good start for you to understand what the mice can do and often what it can’t do. First let’s talk about climbing abilities they are exceptional climbers essentially they can climb up any rough surface. So a lot of times and buildings that have brick exteriors mice are just going to climb the brick and then where the boards that usually at the top near the soft area of overlaying the break. You’ll notice that a little gap those gaps caused by the mortar joint. That that does use to see you put two bricks together but there’s usually a gap there because it’s usually indented in and the board doesn’t fill that gap. So a mouse just has to climb the brick squeeze right underneath that board and voila it’s inside the attic and has its run of the home. In that situation a commonly overlooked way for mice to get in. I had a lady from Colorado once give me a ring and said she had a brand new house. And she said she had mice and called an exterminator the exterminator came out and did exclusion along the foundation and I said Well didn’t they tell you that mice climb. And she her answer was mice climb. And the answer was Absolutely because the exclusion around foundation was definitely important definitely helped her. But she still had mouse problems. Why. Because mice climb. Don’t forget that if you’re going to do a true mouse exclusion and yes, it is possible. It Is Possible To Do Mouse Exclusion It is possible if we repeat that it is possible to do a full mouse exclusion on the structure. Didn’t say it was easy. Just telling you it’s possible it can be done. You need to go from the peak of the roof all the way to the ground. So that’s how you got to look at that. So mice can climb any rough surface. Second what can we call it rope climbing. But they can climb a 10 gauge wire. So that’s a wire. That’s the theory the thinnest wire they’re going to be able to climb. How good are they at swimming well unlike the Norway rat the mouse mouth is a very poor swimmer. So you’ve probably heard many of the stories where people have created little ramps over buckets full of water and they put some peanut butter on it and when the mouse gets on it the mouse falls off and falls into the water in the course and he’s swimming for a while and can’t and can’t get back out because he drowns.

Let’s kick around a little bit about bedbugs. You know I’ve been to a lot of training classes over the last year pretty consistently. And bedbugs come up all the time because let’s face the reality they’re gonna be with us for a long long long time. And we’re always looking for solutions we’re trying to find ways to deal with them. And what I want to talk about today is maybe a different perspective. On dealing with the situation. Because as I’ve said in many of my other sessions what we have to bring our clients if we’re going to hold on to them is peace of mind. And the reality with bedbugs is really something. And there were some discussions in one of the classes we had at Baltimore last week at the interstate conference and one of the individuals on stage that I actually shared the same stage with on altering classes was Dini Miller and Dini brought up something that I’ve heard many times before but I’m so glad she said it. Because it’s the reality of what we’re dealing with and what she said was. Imagine you’re in a restaurant and a fly buzzes across a table maybe lands on the edge of your plate. You’re going to wave your hand and make it go away. Let’s say you’re sitting in that same restaurant and a cockroach is seen on the wall. Oh my goodness that’s gross and disgusting you’re gonna call the manager and fuss and maybe get a free meal out of it. However if there’s a bedbug that maybe crawls across the booth or seen on a person in the building. Oh my goodness. They’re gonna shut the restaurant down. It’s gonna be on the news at 6:00. It’s gonna be on the Internet. It’s gonna blow up like crazy and it’s gonna be nuts. And the reality is which one of those insects is most likely to kill you. The fly. Why The Pest Control Does Very Little To Prevent Pest Introduction? So maybe what we need to do is educate people a little bit better on the realities of this creature. This is not the format for that. What I want to try and do here is just give you a different way to look at things that may help you. You have to understand you have to get this what our industry does is prevent infestation. This industry does very little to prevent introduction And that’s just the reality because pest pressure is constant. Oh I know we can rodent proof a building or something like that. But the reality is we’re structural folks we deal with human habitat we deal with buildings we deal with transport devices we deal with things that people occupy. And so what we have to do is make sure pest populations can not infest those zones. Can we prevent introduction. Well especially with something like bedbugs how. The next person walking in with all good intention may have just come from a movie theater and they had their backpack with them and maybe they got bedbugs in the backpack at the movie theater or in the cube farm that they work in or at the kid’s daycare center or at the school or they were trying on clothes at the local department store. Heaven only knows we can’t prevent introduction. So what we have to do is prepare our clients so they will not get an infestation. And the way you do that is informing yourself about the way these insects work.