We had local exterminator Jeff Wells with Advance Pest Control stop by the BW Morning Show to talk about pest control, and what homeowners can do to help control pests.
We asked Jeff what his expectations are for this spring and summer. “It's, you know, in fact, my wife and I were talking about this earlier in the year, and I said, this may be one of those years where our our swarm calls are really up,” said Wells.
We asked about swarm season and how it's going so far this spring. “So we have received a bunch of, you know, termite swarm calls, they're coming. And you know when they show up, boy, you know, because they don't show up in single spies, but they are in battalions when they arrive. And so, lot of phone calls with those going on right now. And there's a distinct difference between swarming termites and ants. and ants will also swarm this time of year,” said Wells.
Wells said that one important thing to remember when you call a pest control service is to save the bug. Any pest control company you call out to your home needs to know the target pest.
He elaborated on why that is so important, “We had an instance the other day where a customer thought they had bat bugs. Turns out they didn't have bat bugs. They had bed bugs, and the treatment for those two critters varies. In fact, the treatment differential between bids was about $6,000 and so just the little hairs on the pronotum of this bug made the difference in what that treatment was going to look like. And so again, it's just super important for us to know what we're going after,” Wells said.
Thats because they can choose the products, the right products to make sure they are applying them appropriately.
On a final note, we asked what the homeowner can do preemptively to help with pest control.
“I think folks can do a lot of stuff around the outside of their house to help reduce population of nuisance insects, the occasional invaders that we'll call them, and a lot of that has to do with manicuring stuff, removing, you know, debris, from around the outside of the house. Same thing with termites. If we can avoid stacking, you know, wood right against the house, create some breaks and some spacing. That really does, does you a lot of good even, kind of keeping the dirt away from the brick ledge of the house and kind of keeping it down off the siding. You just have a little Mother Nature pest control helping you along the way, and she's a lot cheaper than the rest of us.”