We have all had those moments when we have worried about creepy-crawlies climbing into our homes through drains. But most of us dismiss this scenario as an impossibility, after all how could insects travel such a vast distance without being washed away by flowing water? Well, as it happens, there is one exception–drain flies. It would not be accurate to say that drain flies travel from sewers only to eventually arrive in people’s homes; instead, drain flies prefer moist conditions, such as the environment that exists directly below sink and shower drains.

Drain flies thrive within homes and other indoor locations that have been abandoned for extended periods of time. You will likely not encounter a drain fly in a home where water runs frequently, due to the obvious reason that running water would wash drain flies down the drain quickly. Therefore, drain flies are rarely a serious problem, and they are always a merely temporary problem.

Homeowners often spot drain flies upon returning home from a vacation, but luckily, drain flies will disappear once normal household activity resumes. However, sometimes homes can be abandoned for a long enough time to allow drain flies to establish a more stubborn presence within homes, and this is especially true when drain fly populations have grown to sizes that homeowners cannot manage without the assistance of a pest-control professional. Drain fly infestations, although rare, are often particularly difficult to be rid of once they multiply to a certain point.

Much like the majority of gnats, drain fly larvae require moist environments in order to survive. When drain flies infest indoor locations, they are most often found dwelling within toilet bowls, sink and floor drains, within basement drains and within drain pans located underneath refrigerators. It is not uncommon to find drain fly larvae squirming within shallow areas of standing water that are located both outdoors and indoors. If you should discover drain flies within your home, they can most likely be exterminated entirely with a rolled up newspaper and a thorough drain cleaning. But if these methods do not rid your home of these drain-dwelling gnats, hiring a pest control professional may become necessary.

Have you ever witnessed an insect climb into your home through a drain? If you have, was the insect a drain fly?

What are Bed Bugs?

Bed bugs are insects with a brown shell shape and a small head. Like other parasites that live on blood, they have adapted to the travel patterns of their food source. Places where travelers come and go have a high risk for bed bugs. Hotels, motels, and conference halls all deal with this issue. Bed bugs do not care about the rating of a hotel; they simply seek their food.

Where Are Bed Bugs Found Inside Your Property?

Bed bugs stay very close to their food source. They spend daylight hours hiding in cracks near a bed, within the mattress, and among the folds of fabrics. At night they only travel a short way to bite their victim. The bed of a hotel room is the most important place to search when checking for bed bugs. The wall and night stand close to the bed are also important. Leaving your own possessions stored in the bath tub, carefully turn back the bedding and lift up the mattress at both ends of the bed. Check all folds of material, the sewing along the edge of the mattress, and under the mattress. You are looking for beetle shaped insects or dark blood stains around the corners of the mattress. Check under the box springs, search the wall, and move any nearby furniture to search its joints and edges. Check the rest of the room as well- every piece of furniture, no matter how small. If you discover anything that concerns you, talk directly, but politely, to the manager. A different room far from the original room might work. If you find bed bugs there as well, do not stay in that hotel. The caution you practice now is far better than the trouble you face later if you carry a bed bug home in your suitcase or jacket.

What Can be Done if You Have Bed Bugs at Home?

If you discover bed bugs at home, contact your Bug Guardian Pest Prevention experts.

Three signs it’s time to call in a pro

As a homeowner, you know there are some home projects you can take on yourself (painting the guest room) and some that are better left to the professionals (installing electrical wiring in the basement). The same logic goes for DIY pest control. In some cases, do-it-yourself measures are fine but in others, it is best to call in a pest professional to ensure the job is done correctly and safely. So how do you know which pest scenarios are DIY-approved and which are pro-worthy?
In most cases, the answer depends on the several factors, including the type of pest, its threats to your family’s health, the potential for property damage and the size of the infestation. For example, one lone yellow jacket that found its way into your home is no cause for alarm. But a nest of yellow jackets near your front porch? Time to call in the pros.

Specifically, here are a few pests that you should leave to the pros:

 1.    Bed Bugs

Bed bugs are certainly not a pest that should be handled on your own. For one, they are notoriously elusive, often hiding out in hard to detect places like behind electrical switches and under wallpaper. A trained pest professional will know where bed bugs are likely to hide in your home and can develop a treatment plan to target the pests while ensuring the safety of your family and pets.
To effectively treat a bed bug infestation all stages of the bed bug life cycle must be treated, including bed bug eggs, nymphs (babies) and adult bed bugs. Unfortunately, DIY pest control methods are often ineffective against bed bug nymphs and eggs. Attempts to control a bed bug infestation on your own may only exacerbate the problem and give the infestation time to grow. And bed bugs reproduce quickly – one female bed bug can lay one to five eggs in a day and more than 500 in their lifetime, meaning that a small infestation can quickly grow out of control.
In addition, homeowners that attempt to control a bed bug infestation on their own often spend more money in the long run on failed treatments. Some residents with bed bug infestations unnecessarily throw out furniture, clothing and other personal property in an attempt to control an infestation. In extreme cases, homeowners have seriously damaged their homes or sickened their families by misusing pest control products.

 2.    Stinging Insects

Infestations of any type of stinging insect – such as wasps, yellow jackets or fire ants – should always be left up to the professionals. Stinging insects pose serious health risks. In fact, they send half a million people to the emergency room every year. A single colony of stinging insects can contain anywhere from a few hundred to 80,000 members, which can attack if their nest is threatened. Those with allergies to insect stings are especially at risk, but if a large nest of stinging insects attacks, it can be life threatening to anyone.

 3.    Reoccurring or heavy infestations

No matter the type of pest, if you have an infestation that keeps coming back no matter what you try, it’s time to contract a professional. Reoccurring pest infestations are a sign that your home is just too enticing for pests. Perhaps a small access point (such as a tear in a window screen or a crack in the foundation) is providing easy access indoors for ants. Or perhaps a drip under the bathroom sink is creating the perfect conditions for cockroaches. Whatever it is, a trained pest professional will inspect your home, determine the infestation and help you resolve it once and for all.
DIY methods are also no match for heavy pest infestations.  Because many pests pose serious health and property threats, a sizable pest infestation should be left up to the professionals to handle, before it can grow any larger.
As a homeowner, there are a lot of DIY steps you can take to help prevent pests from finding their way into your home, but even these are most effective when completed in partnership with a pest professional. And, if you suspect you have an infestation, your first step should always be to call Bug Guardian Pest Control. We will be able to properly identify your pest problem and recommend an appropriate course of treatment.

Ants aren’t all that different from us. Like us, they are looking for food, shelter, and water. Remove their access to these resources in your home and you can greatly reduce their interest in making your home a permanent residence. Because like us, if they can’t find what they’re looking for, they’ll look for it somewhere else. And you want that somewhere else to be outside, in their natural environment. That is rule #1 in getting rid of ants.

1. Wipe up crumbs and spills immediately

Ants seem to start out on your floors and on your countertops. They are there because your crumbs and spills are there. Make a habit of sweeping up crumbs right away. Spills should be wiped up, and if sticky, should be cleaned with soap and water or another appropriate cleanser.

2. Keep food in sealed containers

Opened bags of chips, crackers, cereals, and other snacks should be rolled up tightly and kept closed with a clothespin or other similar device. Sugar and flour should be placed in airtight containers. Honey, maple syrup, and other sticky-sweet goodies should be stored in the refrigerator.

3. Dispose of garbage appropriately and regularly

Keeping food scraps in your household garbage is a huge no-no, especially in the summer. Invest in an outdoor composter and put raw food scraps in the composter, immediately. Raw food scraps include potato peels, banana peels, lettuce ends, carrot tops, and any other uncooked food. You can also toss your egg shells, coffee grinds and teabags into your composter. Make sure to keep your compost bin far away from home’s foundation. We like to use my grandmother’s method of eliminating cooked food scraps. In the summer, my grandmother would put cooked food scraps in a plastic bag and put this bag in the freezer until trash pick-up day. Any food scraps left in your regular trash are a homing beacon to hungry ants.

4. Keep pet food and water dishes clean

Your pet’s food bowl is easy-pickins for ants. Serve your pet only the amount of food that she will eat in one sitting. Any leftover dry kibble should be tossed or put back in the bag for tomorrow. Wet food leftovers should be treated like cooked food scraps (see above). Your pet’s water bowl should be cleaned regularly to avoid an accumulation of food residue or the stray bloated kibble. Your pet’s dry kibble bag should be kept in a airtight container.

5. Seal any cracks and holes on the outside of the home with silicone caulk

Silicone caulk is readily available at any of the big box home improvement stores. Your local hardware store is also likely to carry silicone caulk. Youtube can provide you with a quick tutorial, if you need one, on how to apply caulk to exterior cracks.

6. Repair holes or gaps in window and door screens

Big box home improvement stores sell screen repair kits, but truthfully they can often be a pain. Oftentimes, your local hardware store can be your best resource when you have a rip in a screen. Our neighborhood hardware store fixes screens for $2-$5 a screen. You take them out of the window, drive them down, and often can pick them up the next day.

7. Replace weather-stripping

Your doors and windows can provide easy entry for not only you and your expected guests, but also the unexpected and unwanted guests—ants. Inspect your doors and windows regularly and replace any loose or damaged weather-stripping. These materials are cheap and easy to use. In most cases, you roll it out, remove the backing, and just stick it on.

8. Repair loose mortar around basement foundation and windows

This is a task best left to the professionals. Surprisingly, masons are not as expensive as one might think. Look up a reputable mason, or get a good solid reference from a dependable source.

9. Keep tree branches and other shrubbery well trimmed and away from the house

This is another situation where you may want to call the professionals. We’ve all heard the stories about the neighbor who insists on cutting his trees himself, on a step ladder, with a chainsaw. Save yourself the trip to the emergency room (and the humiliation), and call a tree surgeon to trim your overhanging trees. You can likely take care of the low shrubbery yourself with a good set of hedge clippers.

Still have ants?

If ants persist, despite all your best attempts, a professional pest removal service will be your best bet. A good service technician can provide preventative pest control that can often be environmentally friendlier than you might think. Ants are smart and catch on pretty quick. Once they know your home is being maintained regularly, they will lose interest and look for their resources elsewhere.

Pest control can be a difficult situation, with so many ways to handle it and some many different pests.  Each pest control situation could have several different solutions, but here are the top 5 pest control myths we have seen.

1) The most ideal approach to draw in mice to a mouse trap is by utilizing a piece of cheese. This message, fortified by many tv shows over numerous decades, isn’t totally genuine. Mice would rather eat foods with an abnormal amount of sugar in it. As opposed to cheddar, bits of grain, treats, sugar blocks or nutty spread would be additionally alluring to mice.

2) My home is clean, so it couldn’t have bed bugs. This myth, shockingly, can bring about a considerable measure of mortgage holders to lower their defenses and get to be defenseless to bed bug infestations. Bed bugs are pulled in to places where wellsprings of their sustenance – blood – is accessible, and it doesn’t make a difference whether the living arrangement is clean or messy. The main reason a filthy family would be more powerless to a huge bed bug infestation would be because of jumble concealing early cautioning indications of a bug control issue.

3) My feline will be all the rodent control I’ll require. The fact of the matter is, tamed felines aren’t generally intrigued by being your irritation control specialist. While they may pursue mice and catch one every so often out of a perky soul, family unit felines don’t generally see mice as a risk that they have to kill. Mice can stay away from your pets by going on surfaces and in spaces your pets can’t reach, and are more prone to be pulled in to your home by your pets nourishment and droppings than panicked away by an energetic feline.

4) I don’t see a pest control issue, so I don’t have one. Not having the capacity to see a titan episode of nuisance issues may be soothing to some, yet it isn’t sufficient to feel that your vermin control circumstance is very much overseen. Numerous nuisances, for example, termites and woodworker ants can do a lot of harm to the inside spaces of your dividers and the structure of your home before irritation issue signs are self-evident. Legitimate examination of your home all the time is the most ideal method for keeping pest issues from the earliest starting point. Identify with an irritation control expert to decide how regularly your property ought to be examined.

5) I needn’t bother with specialists or locally acquired showers, on the grounds that I purchased a ultrasonic repeller. Ultrasonic gadgets are intended to utilize ultra-high recurrence sound waves the venders recommend pursue away a wide range of bugs. These gadgets are made accessible by numerous retailers and have been sold for a considerable length of time, however the Federal Trade Commission has cautioned producers over and again that their items and deals materials must be bolstered by logical proof. There is next to no proof to recommend ultrasonic waves push bug issues away, either incidentally or forever. Stay with irritation control experts to verify you take care of business accurately, without squandering time or cash.