The web knows. It knows what you've been reading. It knows what pests really worry you. No, I'm not worrying about bedbugs out here in Wisconsin. But I am wary of them when I go to hotels... especially in NYC.
If you imagine yourself in the market for pest control services in the near future... what pest do you picture? And I mean some kind of animal (including insects and arachnids and so forth). I'm not setting up your lame political jokes.
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Insects (fleas and termites) are the bane of Southern California. They eat away at paradise.
Gotham has really gone to Hell.
Where's Mayor Gordon when you need him?
Wasps. While deadheading the Liatris yesterday, I noticed a wasp carrying a 4 inch long wisp of something into a crevice under my bedroom window sill.
I live in Stockton California. The bloodsucking leeches I worry about are down at City Hall. They have two legs, forms in triplicate, and the ability lo levee fines.
If you imagine yourself in the market for pest control services in the near future... what pest do you picture
I picture FOXES. The nasty little bastards want to eat our cat, eat the neighbors chickens, poop on the deck and the welcome mats and are aggressive towards us when we confront them. We have tried live trapping ourselves and shooting them. I think we need a professional trapper.
We already have our house and shop buildings sprayed for insects monthly from April to October so our wasp, ant and spider infestations are low.
Black widows. I've been in old homes that haven't been occupied in a while, and have seen black widows basically taking over an entire room or so. I saw egg sacs on the walls, and a little bit of bug spray got three coming out of the walls right away. No telling how many were hidden.
I'm not an arachnophobe, but that still gives me the shivers.
Also, mice. My parents live in the mountains where they sometimes have big increases in the deer mouse population. Once they get comfortable inside it's a huge pain to get them all out. Deer mice are terribly cute, but quite a pest--especially since most of them in SoCal carry the hantavirus.
Having just moved to madison I've discovered that pest is chipmunks.
The web knows. It knows what you've been reading
I know. That's why I periodically spend some time googling yarn so I will have pretty pictures in the ad side bars. Right now I have shoes :-)
@althouse The web knows. It knows what you've been reading.
Prob'ly. But after installing Abine (an ad-blocker ...and co-incidentally, it also speeded up my online surfing by keeping my old laptop from having to stumble through the ads in the first place) ...after receiving a suggestion to try it, after I publicly complained about audio ads at Hotair ...I'm thinking they're not going to be able to know what I've been reading nearly as well as previously lol.
Equally lol: the captcha code - catioun - is an anagram for caution.
Dick Durbin.
Know what animal is great at sniffing out the location of bedbugs? A beagle. You should bring one with you, for protection.
Personally, my house is constantly overrun with earwigs and centipedes, but raid barrier is doing the trick. Stupid hot summer.
How soon before the gallery goers resort to cannibalism? I'd guess their ability to catch actual prey is negligible. But there's always the homeless.
@ Davis
The web still knows, abine just blocks incoming ads.
Google tracks everything you do, most websites track where you are going and where you've been. (Anyone with a blogger account can see some of this information in the "refering website" tab)
It is what is today. Just be careful about it.
I keep the wasps under control by spraying them and their nests under the roof eaves at 6 AM before they're in fast reaction mode. Best feeling in the world to start the day with a killing spree.
The neighbors' cats. Apart from dogs, they are the most likely animal to spread serious zoonoses to me and my family.
My city animal control will pick up dogs, but not cats, so I have to deal with them myself. I have proven very successful in trapping them, but for every cat I catch, I catch 2 skunks, 4 coons and 6 possums.
I'm told that what I really need are some Chinese or Korean neighbors, who would eat them all.
If you use ad-block, do you block an ad from google reflecting what you've been reading?
It's a tree in the forest question.
I use Ad Block and Do not Track in Chrome. It's blocked over 100,000 attempts to track me since I installed. And if you're not using Chrome, what hell is matter with you?
Can we talk about chiggers next?
Or is 3 pestposts/day the limit?
OMFG these chiggers have made my life this week a living hell. I used to think that I couldn't hate anything more than I hated mosquitoes. I was wrong. F'in chiggers, man.
chickelit, I love walking through LaJolla and seeing the bagged houses. The colorful canvass makes it look like a mini circus.
We have a friend who is an event planner for medical assoc. She had to plan a conference in NYC and worked her ass off trying to find a bed bug free hotel.
john, Many folks don't know chiggers. Having lived in Missouri I hate those fuckers
Earwigs and wasps.
Having just moved to madison I've discovered that pest is chipmunks.
That and those little ants that find my kitchen irresistible.
Chipmunks have been stealing my grape tomatoes. Poor bastard don't know they're stealing tomatoes from a dago. That is unacceptable. No critters seem interested in our basil.
"Gotham has really gone to Hell. Where's Mayor Gordon when you need him?"
The one time I used exterminating services at my house, it was for bats. I called the batman.
"I picture FOXES. The nasty little bastards want to eat our cat, eat the neighbors chickens, poop on the deck and the welcome mats and are aggressive towards us when we confront them. We have tried live trapping ourselves and shooting them. I think we need a professional trapper."
You can make a coat out of your pests. These other pests... Well, but maybe bats would make a beautiful jacket, combining the fur and the wing leather....
That and those little ants that find my kitchen irresistible.
Wash your kitchen counters and cupboards with a strong solution of white vinegar and water. You may have to do that several times. And of course seal up anything that has sugar in it.
:-D
"Well, but maybe bats would make a beautiful jacket, combining the fur and the wing leather...."
I've Googled, and I don't think it has been done, which makes me realize that if I were to do it, I could...
1. Be in the NYT with my art gallery show featuring my bat leather and fur creations...
2. Win "Project Runway — Extreme!"
maybe bats would make a beautiful jacket, combining the fur and the wing leather....
Woah!!! Very Goth. You would need to have some flashy body piercings to complete the look.
No, not bats! There is a fungal disease that is devastating bat populations. Read here.
I originally--hastily--posted that I am afraid of rattlesnakes down here in Texas. But then I realized that we're talking about pests that infest homes. So I will revise that to I am afraid of scorpions infesting my house. It's been known to happen.
Dick Durbin.
MOST (all?) politicians.
Brown recluses.
Oh, and also? I have Ghostery which blocks all those tracking bugs and Adblock which blocks all the ads. I don't have many indications of being watched, which is nice, but I'm sure it's still going on.
We are OCD about bedbugs. When we travel we often keep everything in sealed Ziploc bags. They sell very large ones for storage. If we return from a trip in the summer, we leave everything in the car for a day to kill any bedbugs that might be hiding in the luggage. (The temperature in a closed car reaches well over 115 degrees on a hot day around here.)
Yesterday, at another blog, I was accused of being afraid of lefties hiding under the bed. This looks much worse.
I like bats. Been lobbying to build a bat house - to cut down on mosquitoes - but everyone else freaks at the idea.
Do you think insects might co-operate across species? I was cleaning up daylilies at the mouth of a ground bee hive with the critters going in and out peacefully. Then I moved over a yard and pulled weeds, seriously disturbing an ant colony. Suddenly I had ants all over the sidewalk and the bees which had ignored me earlier were buzzing me like crazy.
Ponder the sad tale of Gregor Samsa. If you spend too much time worrying about the monster under the bed, you become the monster under the bed.
Geese, the ones who hang out at my mailbox, hissing and flapping their big scary wings at me. Did you know geese have teeth?
In the south it's chiggers, ticks and deer ticks. If you haven't encountered deer ticks they're what chiggers aspire to be when they grow up.
At the dock I worked at as a kid, I would daily pull the ticks off the dock dog and chunk 'em in the water to see the bluegill's come up and eat 'em. A flash and a puff of red...sharks got nothing on bluegills for aggressive. Thank God they got little teeth.
Anyway the ticks get as big as marbles, and almost as hard, full of blood. Ghastly creatures. Life cycle of a tick. Get born. Climb a blade of grass. Wait up to 3 years for an animal to pass by. Suck blood till full. Fall off. Molt. Climb bush. Wait for bigger animal....They can go 3 years without eating.
Ticks give me the creeps just thinking about them.
Even the dinosaurs were plagued by ticks. They [ticks] will probably be here long after we are gone.
@Nick: When they tent and bugbomb houses out here they lob in a cannister of sulfuryl fluoride, SO2F2, a gaseous, hellacious electrophile that can suck the electronic juice out of any pest. It's bad for plants and pets too. It's a wonder it's not banned by the Geneva Convention.
@DBQ
Once in the winter time I was out in the woods marking property lines. It was sunny and cold. I had stopped to catch my breath when I heard this rustling sound...very subtle but noticable. I kept looking and looking for a squirrel or a deer, chipmunk, something...there was nothing. Till I looked straight down...hundreds(no exageration) hundreds of ticks were crawling towards me in the leaf clutter. Gaah! I about freaked out. Try to imagine how many insects you have to have to make a noise you can hear as the crawl? Not the scariest thing I ever saw but damnnear the creepiest.
Our war against insects is a close one.
They reproduce abundantly, have marvelous defenses, find food way too easily.
We rely on chemicals like DDT and Chlordane...oops, those most effective chemicals were regulated out of usage by the EPA because...?
Why, because they work for too long and that can be an imaginary threat to the people who will live here 100 years later when our homes are gone with the wind of a small risk of getting cancer.
Today's bullies are the DC Bureaucrats.
I'm not setting up your lame political jokes.
Oh. Yeah, you are.
Dick Durbin.
what i like to call ticks
Here is semi-rural Arizona it's brown spiders, black widows and diamondback rattlesnakes.
I think of that deadly flu some yahoos converted to be human transmissible, and the birds that carry it.
MOST (all?) politicians.
I'm from IL, so Durbin's pestilence hits close to home.
Before regular shampooing and treatments for fleas, if you had dogs that ran around outside and lived inside could cause a house to be flea ridden. Especially after a month of that house being closed up while a trip was taken.
Then if you walked into it your legs would be blackened from the starving newly hatched fleas jumping on you.
I worked for a pest control company one summer in high school. Some bugs are harder to get rid of than others. Sometimes people would cry when told how to get rid of fleas.
Modern movies featuring cameos by pest control agents:
Naked Lunch (1991)
Blue Velvet (1986)
Hmmm. Both were disturbing films.
Freeman Hunt teased: Sometimes people would cry when told how to get rid of fleas.
OK, I'll bite. How?
"The Flea" by John Donne
Mark but this flea, and mark in this,
How little that which thou deniest me is ;
It suck'd me first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea our two bloods mingled be.
Thou know'st that this cannot be said
A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead ;
Yet this enjoys before it woo,
And pamper'd swells with one blood made of two ;
And this, alas ! is more than we would do.
O stay, three lives in one flea spare,
Where we almost, yea, more than married are.
This flea is you and I, and this
Our marriage bed, and marriage temple is.
Though parents grudge, and you, we're met,
And cloister'd in these living walls of jet.
Though use make you apt to kill me,
Let not to that self-murder added be,
And sacrilege, three sins in killing three.
Cruel and sudden, hast thou since
Purpled thy nail in blood of innocence?
Wherein could this flea guilty be,
Except in that drop which it suck'd from thee?
Yet thou triumph'st, and say'st that thou
Find'st not thyself nor me the weaker now.
'Tis true ; then learn how false fears be ;
Just so much honour, when thou yield'st to me,
Will waste, as this flea's death took life from thee.
This has been a remarkably insect-free season in Denver. I have seen insects, but not many. I leave the doors wide open. Mentioned that, and the person said, "yeah, me too." So it's not just me thinking it.
The fires did that, I bet, in some mysterious way and that thought leads to concern about the hummingbirds up there maybe not behaving the usual way. This may affect the Great Hummingbird Migration.
To prepare myself psychologically when I prepare for the Great Hummingbird Migration but don't see one, don't worry, the fires wrecked it this year.
GOPHERS!! I have ticks, black and brown widow spiders around, bobcats, cougars, ,mosquitoes, feral hogs, coyotes, chiggers and wasps but gophers eat everything I plant. I went out one day and my fig tree was laying on the ground, on its side, the roots were gone, just teeth marks were left. Looked like miniature beavers had been around. If the gophers don't get it the leaf cutter ants do the job. And my nephew is an exterminator!
YMMV. I travel a lot, and I always inspect hotel rooms closely for evidence of bed bugs before unpacking. I've found evidence of bed bugs in hotels in every part of the country. They seem just as common in fancy, 4+ star hotels as in budget hotels. Strangely, I've never run into them in NYC. The place that I've seen them the most: Boston, by far.
Scutigera coleoptrata.
A not uncommon thing to do here in Kentucky in the spring is to drive around in the country with rifles shooting ground hogs. At least, that's what I've heard. :-)
Freeman Hunt teased: Sometimes people would cry when told how to get rid of fleas.
OK, I'll bite. How?
i didn't mean to tease; it's not that interesting. Repeated extensive vacuuming, always putting the vacuum bag outside afterward, and repeated treatments. There was a certain time interval, but I can't remember what it was. They aren't like other bugs that you can spray for and wipe out.
These are the lessons from working one summer at a pest control company:
1) Treat your animals for fleas. You do not want fleas in your house.
2) If you ever see a roach, call an exterminator. If you see one outside the wall, there are lots of them inside the wall.
3) Don't leave your car windows open when you're not in the car.
Fin.
I recently had some mice chew through the HDMI cable between my computer and my TV. It shorted out the HDMI card on the TV and made it useless for a monitor. I bought some mouse traps which they consistently out maneuvered, so I bought an electronic mouse electrocution chamber thingy that runs on batteries. After shocking myself a few times, it did quickly did the trick and executed the culprits. You could say they overdosed on the electric current they were addicted to. A just end, but who pays for my $1000 flat screen? They had no estate to sue.
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