Transitioning towards winter, autumn signals various creatures to prepare for the cold. Among those creatures that start to seek shelter and forage for food are pests. Unchecked, they can sneak into your home and pose a problem for you and your family.
To keep them from wreaking havoc in your home in the coming cold months, you need to invest in pest control.
Importance of Fall Pest Control
From Thanksgiving feasts, Halloween candies, and holiday bashes, the fall season is a period for celebrations and gatherings. However, for every party, unwanted guests are always a problem. These gatecrashers may not be what you expect because they won’t enter through your front door. Instead, they will crawl into the nooks and crannies of your home, discreetly gnawing on your food stash and bugging your life.
The need for pest control services is an all-year demand, but every fall the number of pests spikes even higher. With ants, rodents, bees, wasps, and other nuisances seeking warmth and hideouts, your heated and stocked homes are their perfect refuge. The very structure of your home is inevitably vulnerable to infestations.
Modern architects and engineers have created designs that will significantly lower these risks. However, with so many factors involved such as weather, location, and lifestyle, it’s better to take extra precautionary measures. The only way to do that is by hiring professional pest control services. With so many pest species, chemicals, and steps involved, you might make things worse if you go the DIY pest control route.
Common Pests During Fall
Effective pest control starts in vermin profiling. Each of the common home invaders requires special treatment and care from your exterminator. Some of them will build burrows, nests, hills, hives, and more. To flush them out properly, you have to adapt your tools to their behaviour and customize your pest control measures. For comprehensive pest eradication, here are the common species to look out for:
- Ants
Natural foragers, ant colonies can be mostly found in your kitchen and dining room. Certain ant species will prefer to build their tunnels in wood, concrete, and soft soil. This makes them more difficult to exterminate because they can easily adapt to different living situations and transfer their colony when endangered.
Other ant species even have a tendency to be aggressive when disturbed, causing painful and itchy bites. The good news though is that you don’t have to be a detective just to find them. They’ll often be seen forming a line going back to their colony. These ant trails will lead you below your floorboards, under carpets, underneath tiles, within concrete cracks, wood gaps, and plant pots.
The key step to completely stop them from going back to that spot is making sure that their queen is eliminated. Even if you’ve destroyed the entire colony structure, but their queen is still alive, the colony will endure. For a more thorough termination, you can always call an ant exterminator to help you.
- Bugs
Seeking warmth and protection from the coming harsh winter winds, bug and insect migration towards your home starts to increase during fall. Common garden bugs that live in your yard will start to fly in.
Infestations by box elder bugs, stink bugs, and ladybugs can cause foul smells to permeate throughout your home. Compared to ants, these garden bugs typically work alone, finding crevices in your house to nest in.
If threatened or squashed, these autumnal bugs will produce protective hormones that drive off predators. However, for you, these chemicals will translate as unwelcome odours.
One of the pests that you should also look out for is bed bugs. Almost microscopic, bed bugs are an invasive species that hide in places of rest, like the couch or the bed. They bite their hosts and suck blood, which can disrupt your sleep. Once you suspect you have a bed bug infestation, call pest control for bed bugs.
- Cockroaches
Unhygienic and hard to kill, cockroaches are the bane of every household. Favouring moisture and darkness, they like to live inside your drainage pipes, garbage bins, and kitchen sinks.
Key signs of a roach infestation are moltings, eggs, and tiny flecks of roach wastes. Searching for crumbs and food, they’ll often crawl around the room when you’re not around. Winged roach species can easily flit around and escape your grasp, which makes them harder to catch.
The best thing to do to make them feel unwelcome is to keep your house as clean as possible. However, their presence in your home is unavoidable unless you hire a professional cockroach pest control service.
- Flies
Fluttering and buzzing flies are not really that equipped for the cold. Their population usually declines as the winter and fall months come in. However, some of them do tend to survive and thrive in your warm home.
Bringers of diseases and pathogens, fly clusters during fall, are often found near fruit and pumpkin piles. Some even gather around Thanksgiving leftovers and feasts. Experts also suggest that homeowners look at the south and west walls of their homes. These areas are warmer and more habitable for flies during the cold months.
To keep them away, you can place fly traps near your kitchen or porches. Making sure that your home is clean is also a guaranteed way of keeping them from your house.
- Rodents
Warm-blooded animals, rodents are usually not affected by the cold that fall and winter bring. They still remain active despite the subzero temperatures which makes rat control even more difficult.
Compared to insects, rats will often nest on their own and create a hibernation space. Creating nests in your attics, walls, and floorboards, they can remain undetected for a long time. Search for scratches, gnaw marks, and fecal droppings; these are the tell-tale signs of a rat infestation.
- Stinging Insects
Seeing one or two wasps or bees inside your house may not be cause for alarm. However, if it happens more often, call pest control right away. Bees and yellow jackets possess stings that can cause adverse reactions. They may even bring in some pollen inside your home, triggering allergies.
Fall Pest-Proofing Tips
The fall season does not only bring people inside. Insects and pests will want to cozy up and feel warm too. These spikes in the pest population in your home can be easily predicted and expected as the cold season approaches.
So, instead of waiting for them to get inside and start an infestation, you can perform some preventive measures that can make your house safe and pest-free. By doing these safety steps, you get to save up money from pest control companies, and keep safe from pesticides:
- Among these precautionary steps is putting up a screen in your chimney and windows.
- Do a spring cleaning beforehand and soak up all the moisture from your basements and drainage systems.
- Sealing cracks and crannies in the outskirts of your house with caulk and steel can stop the pests from gaining entry.
- Keeping your food inside air-tight containers can also keep rats and ants from foraging inside your grocery stocks. You can even try putting a lock in your cupboards and cabinets for more security.
Picking a Pest Control Company
Before searching online for an exterminator service near you, there are a few things you need to check. You have to make sure that the company you’re dealing with know what they’re doing.
Find out about the company’s experience. How long have they been in business? What’s their track record? What do former clients say about them? Do they have experience with handling pest problems like yours?
Ask about their qualifications. Do they have the necessary licenses and insurance papers? Are these up-to-date and the correct classification for the job? This is one way of verifying their legitimacy.
The equipment that they use should also be the latest model, and their offered services should fit your needs.
Before inviting your family and friends for the autumn holidays, it’s important to double-check that no unwelcome guests come in tow. Pests can squeeze into any tight space, like wall cracks and ceiling gaps, to gain entrance, which makes it extra difficult to evict them on your own. Any pest that is looking to leech off warmth and shelter inside your home should be dealt with right away.
So, instead of hiring an exterminator in the middle of the season and running the risk of having to deal with a full blown infestation, call in an exterminator early in the season so they can provide preventive measures that will keep pests at bay.
Make sure that you don’t have any party crashers this holiday season. If you’re in need of pest control services near you, get in touch with Mr. Pest Control. We are ready to help you with your pest control needs in Ontario. Pests like bed bugs and stinging insects like wasps and bees are not a problem for us. Call us today at 1-888-794-7378 for a free estimate.
