deBugged

Ok – You’ve got a picnic planned for the holiday weekend.  You know, the checkered tablecloth, the dogs and burgers cooking on the bbq and Aunt Mary’s homemade potato salad.   To prevent unwanted guests (other than the gazillion calories in Aunt Mary’s potato salad) like ants, wasps, flies and mosquitoes from showing up, here’s a few tips from some of our chief Ehrlich entomologists:

1. Choose a dry location for your picnic.  Bugs like mosquitoes like being near the water too.
2. Encourage your guests not to wear colognes, perfumes and hairsprays to the picnic as these scents attract flying insects and stinging insects like wasps.
3. Insects love bright colors (think flowers).  Keep this in mind when selecting your picnic ware or accessories such as handbags as well as clothing.
4. Cover your food as much as possible to prevent flies and stinging insects and their contamination. For example, cover the tops of soda cans with aluminum foil and poke a straw through the foil.  This prevents stinging insects from flying into the can.  If one does land on your drink, don’t swat at it.  This simply annoys the insect.  Let it take its drink, and it will leave.
5. Fill a large bucket with sugar water on the outside of your picnic area, away from your guests.  This will serve as an attractant, as opposed to you and your food.
6. Wipe down your picnic area with vinegar or lay down citrus peels, which serve as a natural pest repellent.
7. Apply insect repellent spray to your clothing.
8. Use citronella candles around the picnic site.
9. And lastly, enjoy your pest-free picnic!

The higher the heat, the greater the bites??

Well, I had never really thought about the fact that by turning on the heating in my home (and I did this very early on in November last year), to keep myself nice and cosy, I could be bringing previously dormant fleas or other dodgy biting insects in my home “to life”, so to speak.

But apparently the great winter/spring heating switch-on has an effect on fleas. I had thought it rather strange that I keep on getting the odd random single bites on my face and arm recently and yet I haven’t seen any pests flying around!

Fleas tend to be more of a problem in homes with pets (sadly, we have no pets), but they tend to bite people on the legs and ankles (again, not in my case) and usually produce 2 or 3 bites in a row (but this was not the case for me). So, I am left to wonder what is biting me? It clearly isn’t fleas.

Nevertheless I should find out how to get rid of fleas, and ants and acne as I don’t want them to add to my bite collection.

It seems I will need to up the ante on my housekeeping chores to fight these biting insects, at just the time when all I want to do is sit back and enjoy the warmth of my central heating!!

So I know that its female mosquitoes that bite for example, but do some pests prefer to bite females more than males? It may sound like a stupid question, but my partner hasn’t had any insect bites – they only seem to be going for me!

All suggestions / responses welcome! Whatever the response though, it is certainly true what they (and we) seem to say pretty often…… you can never escape pest control.

Everybody travels to beautiful locations these days. Everybody has beautiful photographs of his/her trip. Everybody has beautiful stories to tell. Yes, I agree on that. However, I have noticed that stories of having seen a certain place of touristic value will not really draw your listeners from the woodwork. BUT as soon as you start telling stories about nasties, such as waking and being crawled over by bedbugs, well, then you really get the audiences undivided attention.

Since travel guide books always give you an extensive list of places to see and things to do (which let’s face it thousands of other people will also see and do), I thought it would be a novel idea to give you my top 5 list of pests to see or experience (not a trip for the faint hearted though if you see them all at once) to make your holiday an unforgettable event.

Trust me, your audience at home will appreciate the extra effort in making the photo-reviewing evenings more interesting by adding some horror to paradise. And yes, I am sharing my first hand experiences with you, and yes they involved a lot of pain and itching.

Maybe a cliché, but listening to travelers it always seems there is an endless collection of horror stories with only one lead role: Cockroaches. I am sure your holiday would be much more peaceful without them (and your risk of food poisoning and other diseases as well). On the other hand there would be less opportunity to scare people at home without them. At best you can create the image of you being a fearless adventurer, because out of the whole group YOU were the only person who took the shoe and killed the offender.

You will be able to discover the local varieties of mosquitoes almost anywhere. But be aware, as with all wild animals there is a need to be alert: Some of these critters might be able to transmit some nasty diseases, such as Malaria, Dengue or Chikungunya. So my advice would be to skip searching for this pest. Anyway, you won’t have much searching to do, as they will for sure find you. In this case though, my advice would be that having almost died of a mosquito-borne disease is too much effort for making your holiday stories more interesting.

Everywhere else known as peaceful pollinators and producers of honey, the local variety of bees (Rock bees), build large nests, preferably on high trees, or on buildings, where they create a lot of trouble for people living on the other side of the windows. They should not be considered as general pests, but definitely do their part in troubling people on the higher levels of buildings.

The urban legends of the giant sewer rat will become truth once you lay your eyes on the secretive, yet common, Bandicoot rat. Best chances to see them are within human settlements and especially at night. Be aware though, they are fierce attackers if cornered (see my first post). Another similar “nice” surprise is the local roof-rats, who can scare you out of your wits with their noises inside a jungle hut at night.

For those of you who think bed bugs are some myth from ancient times, well here is the “good” news, they are still alive and kicking. Try for some very low budget hotel, or travel a lot with overnight busses, and you might be able to spot some of these elusive animals. However, most pest experts will assure you that you have a higher likeability of getting bitten than actually seeing them, which makes actual sightings an exciting photo opportunity to show friends at home. However, due to unknown reasons this pest has managed to increase its geographical reach over the last few years, which might depreciate their value as a holiday experience. And if you are not careful enough, who knows maybe they will travel in your luggage.

Ah, and then there are always fleas, ticks, pigeons and numerous other pests, but the ones I mentioned above should be enough to start with. If you want to go pro, check the pest guides and I am sure you will find more interesting pests.

I have to admit though, that working for Rentokil and the knowledge that all these pests can be controlled, really reduced my fears of involuntarily introducing these pests to my home after some extensive travelling.

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Take a look at these other deBugged lists:
Top 10 unbelievable truths
Top 10 pest urban myths
9 lessons I learnt putting together a blog
Top 5 movies Rentokil would have ruined because its infestation not entertainment

There’s something about a peaceful lakeside vacation that makes you a bit more reflective about the mundane.  Every day me and my colleagues think about pests in some form or another as part of our jobs – pests in homes, bedbugs in hotels, stinging insects at a picnic, the list goes on and on.  But as I watched my friends and family nurse mosquito bites we had received while fishing at dusk, I really started to think about how pervasive pests are.

Pests are not limited by season.  Sure, here in the Northeast, pests are more visible during the spring and summer.  Ants scurry in endless search of food; termites are busy caring for their colony queen, and millipedes are doing whatever millipedes do. In the early fall, we try to avoid stinging insects and survive October’s boxelder bugs that seem to appear out of nowhere.  Even in the dead of winter, we’re mouse-proofing our homes while others battle the cockroach.

Pests are not limited by location or social class.  They’re in the cleanest of homes and the dirtiest.  They’re in budget motels and the swankiest of restaurants. Pests are not limited by economic health.  In the words of our now-retired CEO, “The bugs don’t k know whether we’re in a recession or not.”  When the economy is good, pests are there.  When the economy is bad, pests are still there.

And pests, as I was reminded this week, are not limited by going on vacation.  Pests are the ultimate worker, always efficient and never on vacation.

As the weather warms up and the nights get clammy, this is when an unseen visitor enters your house and takes your property (And I’m not taking about a big burly man with a striped pullover, a mask and a bag with Swag written across it!). This invader is small, doesn’t disturb you when you’re sleeping and like a cat burglar you only know they’ve been until the next morning. What is it you ask? The mosquito…

These insects only make themselves known when you innocently scratch an itchy part of your body and the bump is not only big but also annoys the hell out of you for the rest of the day.

Within Britain there are about 30 different species of mosquito. The Anopheles species (which can also be found on other continents) is a vector for the virus that causes Malaria. Although there has been no recent reported cases of Malaria in this country with climate change occurring it could be back very soon. The last outbreak of this worldwide disease was in 1916-17 in Cliffe in Kent, the last reported man dying of it was as recent as 1952 on the Isle of Sheppey within the same county of Kent.

Your average common household mosquito which bites you tends to be female (no comment!!) with the males feeding on nectar and other sweet substances. To distinguish the sexes you need to look at their antennae with the males having bushy ones and the females being less elaborate. Females find their victim by the use of infra red body heat and also by your exhalation of carbon dioxide from your breath.

How do you protect yourself from these blighters I hear you ask?

Nets could be used as a barrier against these insects. The problem would be it would take half a hour to find your way in and your bed would look like a fairy princesses bed not the image you want to convey if you’re a big roughtie-toughtie type; also one little rip or gap in the net and bham they’re in.

When I worked in a health food shop there were numerous things that could be used such as various types of essential oils such as Lemongrass, Tea-tree oil. The most famous being the lemon-esque smell citronella which is found in candles and insect repellant. Another one was to take a B vitamin supplement or garlic capsules this was supposed to produce a smell from your skin which masked the odour of the body so they couldn’t find you.

I do not know if any of these work but with the hot weather at present these pests (as well as loads of others) are here to stay! With global warming they are not only here to stay but are going to actively seek you out as their next source of their food.