Scary things that your local exterminator can’t help you with…
BOOOO!!!!
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This is a trick, no treat, and there is no reward… Happy Halloween!
Posted on October 14th, 2010 by Andy
Howard Stern’s studio was hit with bed bugs and Stern’s paranoia kicked in, “I was scratching every minute.” Bill Clinton gets mocked on late night TV for having yet another guest besides his wife in bed with him, which is only fitting that a politician gets lumped together with other blood suckers. From Abercrombie and Fitch in New York to airplanes and movie theaters, bed bugs are back with a vengeance. New York being a very transit city and having mass numbers in skyscraper apartment complexes is perhaps at the epicenter of this bed bug pandemic. Reports from New Zealand are now flowing in about their country experiencing a rapid rise in these creepy crawly blood suckers. There is no doubt, that the old rhyme has found a new time.
Where do bed bugs hide?
These parasitic insects feed on the blood of mammals. They were so named bedbugs due to fact that they are most commonly found in bed mattresses. Bed bugs being nocturnal would make the bed of the un-expecting host their home, for easy access. Prior to the invention of electricity, many more hours were spent in bed at night. In today’s fast paced open 24 hours for business, bed bugs nocturnal life style has hit the streets as well. Your mattress no longer matters. Bed bugs will infest couches, the cushions of transit vehicles, the movie theater’s recliners. If there is a night life, a little fabric, and enough to drink, bed bugs can and will invade.
How do bed bugs spread?
Bed bugs primarily spread from the clothing or fur of the host as the host travels. Hotels are frequented by mass volumes of visitors, and are even the retreat of individuals whose homes are being treated for bed bugs. Bed bugs also spread as laundry is being moved. Large apartment complexes are rapidly infested by the proximity of the residents. Bed bugs will also drop to the carpet, and slip through cracks. So they can spread by crawling from room to room, contaminating multiple dwellings in apartments. Bed bugs are difficult to control because most people do not know when the intrusion begins.
Signs of bed bugs.
Bed bugs will often go undetected for the first week or two, allowing time for the population to grow. Their bites carry no sting to them, so most will only begin to notice bites as the numbers increase. The multiple bites will look like a rash. Bites may also line up in a row, which is a distinctive characteristic to bed bug bites. Spots on sheets from blood or brown spots of bed bug fetus are good signs to look for. Bed bugs can also be found hiding in the corners of the mattress. Or in the crevices of screws on the bed posts. Checking your hotel mattress isn’t a bad idea when traveling. Look for blood spots on the mattress itself and check the corners. It may even be wise to carry your own protective bed bug cover or stay in hotels that use mattress covers.
How to protect yourself.
Prevention is worth a pound of cure. Get mattress covers. While this will not guarantee protection of your home, it is the best deterrent you have. And with bed bugs they are far easier to prevent than cure. You should also wash all of your clothes, used or not after traveling. Storing your suitcases away from your bed is also advisable. If your home becomes infested, you can attempt to treat your home for bed bugs yourself. There are do-it-yourself pest control solutions for bed bugs but due to the tenacity of these creatures, it is best to call a professional pest control service. Treatments for bed bugs will take time and effective solutions are not cheap. Find a company that will guarantee their work and that will continue to come back until the problem is solved. Cooperate with the company you employee as well. You may be asked to wash all of bedding, on a regular schedule. You may be asked to keep clothing of the floor and away from beds. Bed bug treatments may even require that the premises are vacated for a few weeks until the site is sterile.
In conclusion, if you don’t want the bed bugs to bite then learn to protect yourself. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Cricket Pest Control by a Droid... This may be the Droid you are looking for.
the first low-cost Android device to hit the Smartphone market in the United States* and the third Smartphone to be included in Cricket’s dynamic line of phone offerings. http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20101006005730/en/Cricket-Shows-Respekt-Low-cost-Android-DeviceWhile I am not quite ready to give up my iPhone… despite some small bugs… Offering me a test drive of the droid at a $55 low cost, unlimited access plan makes my iPhone look like yesterday’s news. So… Yes. I am falling for the cricket bait. … I hope everyone appreciates the puns loaded in this post about a pest control guy falling for cricket bait! NEED A CRICKET PEST CONTROL SERVICE?
Thomas Ballantyne
@Thos003
Don’t mind me I am just the pest control guy…
FYI, Bulwark offers Full Service pest control.
Recently I had the distinct pleasure of having to make an emergency stop into a tire shop during the middle of a very busy day. No, it wasn’t for white wall weevils infesting the new Good Years just shipped in but my tires were showing severe wear & I was afraid to go one more mile before having them changed. Now it was a very interesting day let alone expensive but as with everything that comes along in my life I try to learn something positive so at the very least I can count all things a ‘plus’ for me and not a negative. This is what my day at the tire store revealed to me.
While waiting for my service I went through 15 cups of coffee and about an hour and a 1/2 of the ‘How thing’s were made’ marathon on the eh emm, free TV in the lobby. The first was how fortune cookies were made and let me just say there are more lottery winners with fortune cookie numbers than anything else so I may just try and forget what I know about bugs and Chinese restaurants to get some of that action. The rest of what I watched was how to make a cheeseburger and the show took you through each ingredient from start to finish and I found it fascinating. What struck me the most was the amount of thinking that goes into even the simplest things and the technology to ensure that each onion, burger pattie, bun and even ketchup was PERFECT and has no varying characteristic in it so that each time you bite into a burger, it’s always the same. A quick example was the ketchup testing lady who measures the viscosity of every batch that gets made. YES that’s right, I said viscosity, determined by the ketchup’s velocity- I mean there’s nothing worse than runny ketchup on a burger is there? This of course got me to thinking about pest control products- I mean isn’t that a normal transition? (well maybe just for me)
Why is it that every pint of Suspend SC or bucket of Boric Acid you buy is exactly the same every time? Much like the ketchup lady there are years of testing and millions of dollars that have gone into getting every detail exactly right and making it duplicatable. Now let’s go one further because we all know the ‘cide’ at the end of any word means to kill and if any aspect of pest control needs to be scrutinized, logic would say this would be the most critical area of concern. To begin with not any old pesticide can just be made up in the garage and put out on the market. The EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) is in charge of setting standards for testing pesticides under the FIFRA Act (Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide) and Toxic Substance Control Act, TSCA. Now the EPA doesn’t do all the said testing per se but sets what is called “Good Lab Practices” which the firms testing a pesticide must adhere to and any deviation or failed test is always met with lengthy, expensive retesting which averages out to about 10 years for final approval and a registration number. Now I tried to do due diligence with research on this subject to give you what I could but found the whole subject ruled by braniac’s far to smart for me. These are of course the same types of smart people who write our labels for how to properly use the final product and I have a pretty strong opinion on that you can read here, but I digress. Here are just a few things which the pesticides you buy and use are tested for and the purpose or goal of such testing.
Acute Oral Lethality, Acute Dermal Lethality, Acute Inhalation Lethality, Primary Dermal Irritation, Dermal Sensitization, Primary Ocular Irritation, Acute Delayed Neurotoxicity, 21 Day Dermal Exposure, 90 Day Dermal Exposure, 90 Day Feeding Study, 90 Day Inhalation Exposure, 90 Day Neurotoxicity Assessment, Chronic Feeding Study, Oncoginicity Study, Teratogenicity Study, Reproduction Study, Gene Mutation, Chromosomal Aberration Studies, Other Genotoxic Effects, General Metabolism and Domestic Animal Safety.
Now these test do not include the barrage of environmental studies but it took over 485 pages to just explain the scope of this list so I think you get the picture here. The goal of the testing is just as lofty in it’s explanation.
As defined by Hayes (1975), toxicology is “the qualitative and especially the quantitative study of the injurious effects of chemical and physical agents, as observed in alterations in structure and response in living systems; it includes the application of the findings of these studies to the evaluation of safety and to the prevention of injury to humans and all useful forms of life.”
So while this is all pretty impressive what does this mean to you and to I? While the world screams foul and greed to the big chemical companies of the world, insecticides are perhaps the most tested substances known to man. This does not ensure 100% safety because it does come down to the applicator but it should at least put to rest some fears that these products in and of themselves are not evil or oozing contamination and injury just by existing. Pair up these pest control products with a professional technician who undergoes rigorous testing of another kind and you have the makings of a very uniform, reliable and effective service that will keep you and your family bug free. Pesticides are made to benefit mankind and have been so for many years and are only getting better. So the next time you’re waiting for that ketchup to slowly pour out of the bottle you can thank the ketchup velocity lady for that very predictable result and just as well, the next time you have a serious pest control issue and pesticides need to be used. You can thank your chemical manufacturers and the tech who applied it professionally to kill those bugs.
Jerry Schappert
Article found on Houston Roach Control 
Introduction:
• Cockroaches are one of the oldest groups of insects and are very successful because they are able to adapt so well to their environment. One reason for this is because of their diet. They are scavengers and will eat anything organic.
• Most species are of tropical or subtropical origin and they are not social insects, but will still be found in large numbers.
• The cockroach is of great importance to humans because they are known to carry many disease pathogens and can cause allergic reactions as well. Some disease pathogens they carry are: bacteria, such as Salmonella, Staphylococcus, Streptococcus, Coliform, Bacillus, Clostridum, Escherchia coli (diarrhea), Shigella dysenteriae (dysentery), the protozoan-caused parasitic toxoplasmosis and hepatitis B antigen. They also carry diseases no longer a major threat in the U.S., such as cholera, plague and polio.
• The United States has about 50-70 of the approximate 4,000 species living worldwide. Only a few of these will inhabit man’s dwellings. The three most common of these are, first: the German cockroach, second: the American cockroach and third: the brown-banded cockroach.
Identification:
• The body is oval in outline and usually flattened. The wings are leathery with veins and cover the body. The antenna is long and threadlike. Cockroaches are brownish in color and about ½ in. to 1 ½ in long. Color and size will vary depending on species.
• Identification is important because cockroach species vary in food preference and living habits. For example: the American cockroach prefers living in food storage areas, basements and sewers. They prefer fermenting foods and are usually brought into a home on bags, clothing or other objects and through sewer lines. The Australian cockroach is very similar in appearance, has habits like the American cockroach, except they don’t like sewers and prefer to feed on new plant shoots or starchy foods. They are most likely to be brought in on potted plants from stores and nurseries.
Life cycle:
• Cockroaches have a simple metamorphosis: eggs, nymph, and adult. The nymph looks like the adult in appearance, except it is smaller and the adults have wings. All newly hatched cockroaches are white in color, but in a few hours, as their cuticle hardens, they assume their typical color.
• Female cockroaches lay eggs containing single egg cases or capsules, called ootheca. Each capsule has eggs arranged in two parallel rows opposite each other and may contain 4-60 eggs, depending on the species. The ootheca is usually dropped or glued to some sheltered surface near a food source, within a couple days of formation. Some species retain the ootheca, incubate it and this can give the illusion they are giving birth to live nymphs. Developmental time can vary depending on temperature, humidity and species. It can be 53 days for the German cockroach and as long as 2 years for the oriental cockroach. Usually a high temperature and high relative humidity in their harborage will shorten the developmental time.
Habitat:
• Cockroaches are gregarious (stay together in groups) by nature, but tend to separate by size. The size grouping depends on the size of the crack or crevice they are able to squeeze into and use as a harborage. They are nocturnal but can be found during the day when their harborage is filled to the max or overflowing. Cockroaches spend about 75% of their time in cracks and crevices which are small enough to barely squeeze into. The most preferred harborage is that of proper size and which is near a food and water source, as well as being warm with high relative humidity.
Feeding:
• Cockroaches feed on anything organic. They prefer foods that are starchy but will feed on sweets, grease, meat products, cheese, beer, leather, glue, hair, book bindings, flakes of dried skin or any decaying plant and animal matter.
Friday… Last choir of the day is 7 degrees of separation. ☺☺☺☺☺
Denver Airport
Denver’s Airport just happens to be the largest in the US. It has a lot of people running around. I am sure a lot of people are easily annoyed with such large crowds. Can you imagine the crumbs they have laying around there all day? Landfill or land-size? At 53 square miles it ranks 3rd largest in the world! Which makes me think of Boston.
Boston has got to be a very crowded city. The Denver airport at 34,00 hectares is bigger than the city limits of Boston. So when I think of Denver’s airport, being larger than Boston’s city limits, traveling, being crowded, over populated… I think of cheap hotels.
Well if you end up in Boston, the regular hotels are overpriced because of the land shortage, so you end up paying high dollar for a cheap hotel. So now my Denver Airport trip to Boston’s overpriced cheap city hotel leaves me tired of annoying crowds and wanting a good night’s rest.
Well wouldn’t it be nice if this cheap hotel had a memory foam mattress? At the price I am paying for this crowded cheap hotel they sure could afford one. They could also afford to fix the little bugs in the flickering neon hotel sign. Man wouldn’t it be nice to get some real service around here?
No memory foam mattress, a vexing neon sign, from my over crowded flight from Denver to a cheap Boston hotel… That buzz of the neon sign is almost as bad as a growing chirping irritation from a cockeyed cricket making me lose my sleep!
Well when I’m out about and I hear a crackedy cricket interrupting my movie or signing through my sports game, I think to myself, “There’s no place like home!” Away from all the massive airports, crowed Boston cities, cheap hotels, hard mattresses, buzzing neon signs, and crickets. Home where I get real service from a really good pest control company.
… Ahhh, home sweet home. Perhaps the only other thing that could make this pest free life better would be a nice memory foam mattress.
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