Saturday, April 23, 2011

Things Are Starting to Move

      At the middle of March, we mailed out fliers, with return post cards, to existing customers offering flea, wasp, and carpenter ant prevention treatments. We have gotten a lot of them back, and are doing those treatments now.
      We're starting to get calls for ants of all varieties, carpenter ants and the small household ants people typically call sugar or grease ants. Small household ants do no damage. They are just a nuisance. Carpenter ants however, can do serious damage depending on the location of their nest, because, while they don't eat wood for food, they tunnel it out for an area for their nest. If it is in the weight bearing structure of the house they can cause thousands of dollars of damage. If you ever run across a pile of sawdust somewhere in your house, this is normally indicative of a carpenter ant nest right above the sawdust, however, most people just see ants crawling around inside the house and never see any sawdust.
       Squirrels are becoming active in attics, but at this time of the year there may be young present. Never close up a hole where squirrels are entering, unless you are absolutely sure the squirrels are not inside, because they will chew a new hole to get out, and that hole might be in the ceiling, with the squirrel winding up in your lap.
       As soon as we get a couple of consecutive days with temperatures around 70 degrees, the phone will start ringing off the hook for people with wasps. If they are yellow and black, they are not yellow jackets, but Mediterranean wasps. True yellow jackets don't usually become a problem until late July.