Most pests seek shelter, food, and water. Limiting these sources and eliminating their hiding places can drastically reduce pest populations.
Remove clogging materials from areas where pests breed and hide. Clean up and seal cracks, crevices, and holes that they use to enter a home or building. Properly use traps and baits to kill existing pests. Contact Pest Control Malibu now!
The age-old saying “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” applies especially to pest control. A preventive approach to pests reduces the need for reactive treatments and often saves money. Pests are more than just a nuisance; they can cause health and structural damage. In addition, some pests, such as rodents and cockroaches, carry allergens that can affect people’s health and cause discomfort or pain.
The best way to keep pests at bay is a combination of good site sanitation and maintenance, improved building design and construction, and effective monitoring. Using specialized storage containers and careful handling of artifacts can also help reduce the risk of pest infestation.
Generally, pests enter buildings through open windows and vents, sewer access points, and cracks in walls, doors, or floors. They can also be carried in by staff or entered on loaned artifacts, merchandise, or equipment. Good site sanitation, regular inspections and cleaning, quarantine and isolation of affected artifacts (with low or high temperature exposure or controlled atmosphere fumigation as needed) all contribute to reducing the threat.
Clutter provides hiding places for pests and gives them easy access to the home. Keeping garbage bins tightly closed and removing waste regularly helps to prevent pest infestations. Clutter should be removed from the outside of the home as well, including wood piles that can be used as nesting areas. Screening vents and ensuring that doors have functional sweeps and are sealed is another great way to prevent pests from entering the house. The perimeter of the home should be kept clear of bushes, plants, and shrubs that can provide pests with an easy path from the garden to the home.
It’s also a good idea to regularly sanitize items in storage that are susceptible to pests such as woollen clothing or books. Thoroughly washing or dry-cleaning these items before storing them will make them less attractive to moths, silverfish, beetles and other pests. Thoroughly vacuuming rarely-used cupboards and storage spaces and cleaning under furniture several times a year can also reduce the chances of an infestation.
Pest Identification
Pest identification is an important first step in any pest management program. Whether it is an insect, weed, plant disease or vertebrate animal, the pest must be identified in order to develop an integrated pest management (IPM) strategy. Accurate pest identification provides key information such as food, habitat and harborage preferences, life cycle stages and other biological traits that are useful in selecting cultural practices, tools or pesticides for control.
The identification of a pest can be as simple as observing the typical damage caused by the pest, examining tracks or droppings left behind by the pest and looking for the typical behavior of the pest. Often it is helpful to have a picture of the pest available, although some pests are difficult to identify from photos alone. In some cases, precise identification may require consulting with an expert or sending samples to a specialized laboratory.
Some pests have a repulsive appearance, such as earwigs, silverfish or bed bugs. Others bite or sting, such as mud dauber wasps or yellow-jackets. Some pests cause diseases or damage to plants and property, such as mice, rats and cockroaches. Others contaminate foods and produce odors, such as pine seed bugs and cluster flies. In addition, some pests carry allergens or irritants that can trigger allergic reactions and sensitivities, such as ants, flies, fleas, wasps, hornets, clothes moths and spiders.
Observing where the pests are found can also be very helpful in identifying them. Look for muddy trails, gnawed wood or other signs of the pest’s presence. For example, a nest of mud dauber wasps may be located in an old stump, and cluster flies tend to overwinter in attics or wall voids warmed by sunlight.
Proper pest identification is especially critical for making chemical treatments effective. Many times, a pesticide application will fail because the wrong pest is being targeted and because the pest is in an environment or life stage that is resistant to the pesticide being used. Incorrect pest identification can also result in unnecessary risk to people and the environment from using excessive or inappropriate chemicals.
Pesticides
A pesticide is a chemical substance or mixture of chemicals that prevents, destroys or controls unwanted species of plants and animals. It can also be used to control diseases and weeds in agricultural crops.
There are many different types of pesticides, including synthetic and organic. Synthetic pesticides are made in industrial laboratories, while organic pesticides are made from naturally occurring materials. Ideally, a pesticide should kill its target with minimal effect on humans, other non-target plants or animals, and the environment. However, no pesticide is perfect and all have side effects.
Pesticides can be applied to the soil, air or water. They can also be sprayed on or around crops or on plant parts that are infested with pests, such as leaves, fruit, buds, stems, roots, bulbs, seeds or flowers. Pesticides can be biodegradable, meaning they break down in the environment into harmless compounds, or they may persist for months or years before breaking down into less toxic substances.
Some pesticides attract and poison or paralyze the pests, while others affect the pests’ ability to reproduce or grow. Those that kill the pests are called insecticides, herbicides or fungicides. Some pesticides have a specific purpose, such as to control blights or mildews on fruits and vegetables. Others act as a defoliant to help with harvesting or promote growth of certain crops.
Other pesticides are designed to change a plant’s physiology. For example, plant growth regulators alter the expected rate of growth, flowering or reproduction, which can reduce a crop’s yield or increase its quality. They can also cause plants to produce more fruit or seed, make it easier to pick, or slow the plant’s maturation from the pupal stage into adulthood.
People can be exposed to low levels of pesticides through eating or drinking contaminated foods, breathing in vapors or touching contaminated surfaces. These exposures can lead to a variety of health problems, from mild rashes or allergies to more serious illnesses such as cancer and reproductive disorders. The Environmental Working Group (EWG) publishes lists of pesticide residues on produce, such as its “Dirty Dozen” and “Clean Fifteen.” Eating a diet full of fresh, whole fruits and vegetables can decrease the amount of pesticides in your body.
Suppression
Pest control is a process that reduces pest numbers to an acceptable level, but causes as little harm as possible to people, property or the environment. It involves prevention, suppression and eradication.
Ideally, preventive measures will keep pests from entering a building or causing damage in the first place. They are also cheaper than pesticides, especially when done on a regular basis, and do less damage to the environment.
However, not all pests can be prevented, or they may be difficult to keep away for one reason or another. For example, some pests have a repulsive appearance or a strong smell, and can be frightening to children or pets, like spiders, silverfish and earwigs. Others bite or sting (real or perceived), like bed bugs, fleas and wasps and cluster flies. Still, other pests are harmful because they contaminate food, destroy plant material or cause diseases in humans and animals, such as fungi, bacteria and viruses.
For these reasons, pest control is often required. It can also be necessary when a pest has escaped into a home or business, like cockroaches, mice, rats, ants, termites and clothes moths.
Threshold levels based on esthetic, health or economic considerations have been established for many pests. Action thresholds are used to define the level at which a pest’s population must be reduced by pest control methods, and they are based on the amount of harm caused by a particular pest.
Some natural forces affect pest populations, including climate, enemies, the availability of shelter and water and the presence of natural barriers. Some of these factors are predictable, but others occur only in certain environmental conditions and can be unpredictable.
Natural predators, parasites and pathogens often suppress pest populations. Biological controls, such as the release of new, disease-causing organisms or sterile males to disrupt reproduction, can also be effective. However, the degree to which they control a pest depends on a number of variables and there is often a time lag between the increase in the population of a pest and the corresponding increase in its enemies.