deBugged

Here in the Northeast, the heat over the past few days has bordered on unbearable.  There are heat warnings and heat advisories on the radio.  The malls and pools are packed with folks looking for refuge.  As I drove home yesterday, my car thermometer hit 102 degrees F.  That’s hot!

It got me to wondering what impact all of this heat has on pests?  Sure, ants, stinging insects and flies love the heat, since they are very obviously active in the summer.  But this is more than just summer heat – this is oppressive.

I posed the question above to one of our bug experts and got some interesting information.  For instance, did you know that crickets chirp less when it’s really hot?  While this is somewhat dependent on the humidity, not even crickets want to work when it’s this hot.   Also, would you have guessed that we get an increase in customer calls for pests like milipedes, centipedes and pillbugs when it’s really hot?   The explanation, it turns out, is that pests don’t like this kind of heat any more than we do.  They’re looking for refuge and often find it in basements and crawl spaces where it’s usually cool and damp.

I guess bugs aren’t that different from us after all… they don’t always like the heat and will head off somewhere to cool down.

I have a confession to make: I really don’t like wasps. They bother my kids when we’re having a picnic, they nosedive into my beer and they make a beeline (no pun intended) for my hair.

Because of the freezing temperatures last winter, this year’s a bit uncertain for the little blighters. On one hand, many wasps nests from the 2009 bumper crop may have been left untreated due to the recession. But on the other, this year’s adverse weather may have had a negative impact on wasp populations if queens didn’t survive the winter months. So, with this in mind, we have launched a service to find out what’s happening with our black and yellow foes across the UK – and we need your help!

UKWaspWatch is a website that plots wasp sightings geographically across the country onto an interactive Google Map, together with the severity of the incident using colour-coded markers.

If you have a Twitter profile you can take part simply by tweeting the hashtag #ukwaspwatch together with your postcode and a rating of 1-10, For example: #ukwaspwatch SW1 3/10.

The key on the website indicates whether you have encountered anything from a single wasp, to getting stung, to spotting a small/large wasps nest. You can even add some text or a short-link to a picture of the offending insect in the rest of your tweet.

UKWaspWatch also contains:

• tips on preventing and treating stings,
• dealing with wasps and wasp’s nests,
• some fascinating information on spheksophobia (the fear of wasps).

The application uses open-source web technology to cleverly blend the Twitter API and the Google Maps API in order to geo-code and aggregate tweets using the #ukwaspwatch hashtag. It uses a similar protocol to the #uksnow application that you may have seen during the winter.

You can find more information on the site itself at www.ukwaspwatch.co.uk, so if you have a Twitter account (and even if you don’t), please take a look and help out with this study.

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!

Until my unfortunate wasp sting last weekend I don’t recall being stung by a wasp for many, many years.

My earliest memory of wasp stings is from my childhood (like Danusia’s wasp story) and my Hungarian grandmother insisting on dabbing strong vinegar on to the sting, which I feared almost more than the sting itself! It is supposed to ease the pain but all I remember is that it made it sting even more! Plus I don’t remember reacting very badly to the stings back then.

Last weekend though, walking around a garden centre with my beloved yellow handbag (a mistake, which will not be repeated) I was stung by a wasp on my arm, which was carrying said handbag. It was a very sharp, quick pain followed by throbbing, swelling and a little rash. By the end of the night this had calmed down but for the following 2 days the rash got more severe and redder – it was not a pretty sight.

As we enter the wasp season, which may well mean more wasps this year, I thought I would share my tips for trying to avoid painful wasp stings – unfortunately there are no guarantees though.

• Don’t flap your arms about to try and get rid of them – you will only make them angrier and more likely to sting you ( apparently they don’t need much provocation to sting you in the first place – vicious, I know!)
• Don’t wear yellow , or any other bright colour, which will attract wasps. In my experience, yellow to a wasp, is like wearing red in front of a bull – a big no, unless, of course, you are a trained bull fighter!
• Don’t wear strong perfume / deodorants – I am not advocating lowering your personal hygiene standards just to avoid a wasp sting, but you can probably go easy on the perfume every now and then.
• Tidy away sweet drinks and foods – when eating outdoors, try to tidy away any leftover foods and drinks and empty, unused cups & plates, which could attract wasps to your party.
• Use insect repellent – this can hopefully help to deter wasps and other stinging insects from getting close enough to you to sting you.
• Minimise exposed skin – by wearing a long sleeve top in stead of a t-shirt and trousers instead of shorts – I know this is the last thing you will want to do just as the sun comes out, but it is particularly advisable to those people, who react very badly to wasp stings.
• Avoid places where wasps like to be – orchards are prime locations with all the potential sweet ripening fruits to attract them and keep them busy. (oh, but if you do decide to go fruit picking, perhaps wear gloves?)
• Avoid wasp nests – of course, this is logical, however, tell that to the girl I know who stuck her leg through a wasp nest (admittedly by accident as she did not see the nest) on a camp site and was chased away by hundreds of wasps. Her poor mother spent the rest of the evening, removing dead wasps which had got tangled up in her long, thick hair.

If you find you have too many wasps in and around your home this year, it may well indicate that there is a wasp nest nearby. The best way then to get rid of the wasps, is to essentially remove the wasp nest. That way, hopefully, you can stay “wasp sting-free” this year. Good luck!

With football madness reaching fever pitch when England successfully beat Slovenia yesterday in the last of their group matches, a colleague suggested we put together our best Pest XI football team.

So with suggestions from various colleagues we have come up with the following 4-4-2 formation for a range of pests. The only other football team made up of animals we could collectively recall was the Disney film ‘Bedknobs and Broomsticks‘ – lions, rhinos, ostriches and other large animals battling it out on the pitch… Anyway, back to our team list.

The Rentokil Pest XI

So, let’s start by putting a Herring Gull in goal. Have you seen how aggressive they can get when defending their nests in the breeding season? Nothing would get past them – the ultimate goalie for this team.

In defence you’d want some pests that will do anything to protect their nest (sorry ‘net’) from attack. Perhaps some wasps – their ability to sting repeatedly might deter the other side. Bees would get dropped, they’d die in the act of their first tackle – no stamina, tsk tsk! A millipede would be very practical, simply for its imaginative use of space, and loads more legs on the pitch would obviously come in handy. The common house spider would be an amusing sight on pitch, it would wind its web around the opposition and stop them in their tracks. Our final defender? The bed bug, it is very resistant.

Now for some creative midfielders. The confused flour beetle and crazy ant are renowned for their erratic, maze-y type running style which should open up just about any defence. But I’d leave the Drugstore beetle out of the squad to avoid any doping scandals! We also suggest the female German cockroach – yes, the female. These devoted mothers-to-be can carry around egg cases containing their young for up to a month until they are ready to hatch – so the ideal midfielder for holding on to the ball.

Mice would have to play out on the wing, and would run up the wall-floor junction, sorry line, all day. Rats would not get selected for the team because they would stay back in their familiar half and not venture forward unless they knew it was safe (definitely playing with fear, but a ‘fear of the new’, or neophobia to give it it’s correct term).

You would have to definitely drop squirrels though, whilst good at getting the ball and holding on to it, they would then promptly forget where they put it. Equally, house flies would be useless as they would be attracted to any yellow cards given out and forget about the game in hand.

For the strikers, we’re thinking that maybe fleas, with their ability to use their hind legs to jump to great heights (up to 200 times their body length) will be good enough in the air to get onto any ball and stick it in the net. And how about pairing it up with the ghost ant, since nobody would see it coming….

And finally, not forgettting the Manager. A termite queen – with the ability to direct a group of players of different skills to work together effectively as a team. She uses pheromones to control their behaviour and gets them to work for her selflessly and tirelessly. Maybe thats’s what Fabio had pumped into the dresing room before yesterday’s match

Questions, just for fun:

1. Who would you sub from this Pest XI or who would you bring off the bench?
2. Did you spot the significance of the team numbers, can you explain them all?

(Thanks to Neil for his original idea,  all the brilliant pest suggestions – mostly Andy’s, and Matt’s comments too to bring this idea to life.)