5 Tips To Keep Ants Out Of Your Kitchen

5 Tips To Keep Ants Out Of Your Kitchen

Winter is the time of year when some pests enjoy digging themselves a little deeper into the ground than normal, slowing down, and taking a nice long nap. They will reappear when the weather warms up in spring. Other pests remain active throughout the year, which means they can cause problems all year long. If you’ve noticed ants in your home even though it’s winter, you probably want to know how to prevent them.

Here are five tips to keep ants out of your kitchen:

  • Keep your yard tidy. Ant prevention starts outside. Remove yard debris, such as lawn clippings, branches, and leaf matter. Keep your grass trimmed. Consider replacing any mulch you use in your landscaping with crushed stone instead.
  • Close off entry points. Ants are small and can fit through the tiniest of cracks. It makes sense to seal up as many as you can find to reduce the chance of them finding their way inside. Check around your foundation for cracks and seal the ones you find. Gaps around doors and windows are a favorite way for ants to get inside. Tears or holes in a screen can also allow them access to your home.
  • Clean up spills and put food away. Like most humans, most common ants are quite fond of anything sugary. If you have even a small spill that you fail to clean up, they will find it. The same goes for any food you leave out. Whether it’s fruit on the counter or sugar left in its paper bag, ants will find it. In order to dissuade ants from entering and remaining in your house, you must remove their food sources. Make sure to clean all spills immediately and don’t leave dirty dishes in the sink. Wipe down your counters after every meal. Keep food stored in the refrigerator or in air-tight containers.
  • Eliminate moisture. While most ants are simply a nuisance, there are some that are quite destructive. Carpenter ants can go undetected for months, or even years. Once they get into your home, they chew through the wood structures in your home, causing a huge amount of damage. Carpenter ants are especially attracted to your house if you have water-damaged wood structures in or around it. It’s important to reduce moisture and humidity as much as possible. Eliminate standing water outside your home, and replace any water-damaged wood. Repair leaking taps and pipes. Allow good ventilation throughout your home, and use dehumidifiers in the more humid rooms of your house.
  • Call the professionals. If you find ants in your home, the best way to get rid of them is to get professional help. Russell’s Pest Control has the experience necessary to identify the type of ant you’re dealing with, figure out how they’re getting in, and understand what the best course of action is to eliminate them.

Ants don’t have to be a winter problem. Keep them out of your kitchen this year with the help of Russell’s Pest Control.

What To Do If Bed Bugs Have Stayed In Your Home After The Holidays

What To Do If Bed Bugs Have Stayed In Your Home After The Holidays

After a busy season, the holidays have finally wrapped up. You’ve exchanged all the gifts that weren’t quite right, put your decorations away, and sent your guests back to their homes with promises to get together again soon. But have all your house guests left? It’s possible that some uninvited bed bugs have stayed in your home after the holidays.

How Bed Bugs Get into Your Home

Bed bugs are year-round pests that don’t take a season off. Although they are most active in the summer when the weather is hot and vacationing is at its peak, they remain active throughout the entire year. After the activity of summer, fall often sees an uptick in bed bug infestations as the bugs make themselves comfortable in their new homes. When the holidays roll around and traveling picks up again, bed bugs return to their active lifestyle.

These pests don’t just walk into your house from outdoors. Instead, they travel around with people. They might hitch a ride on someone’s clothing, a purse, bag, or backpack, or in someone’s luggage. When they have a chance they will crawl off of whatever they were riding on, and start to make themselves at home in a new location.

If you had guests over the holidays, it’s possible they inadvertently brought a bed bug or two along with them into your house. It’s unlikely that they took those bed bugs with them when they returned to their own home. If those bed bugs remained in your home, they will end up settling in and eventually reproducing, making the small problem of just a few bed bugs quickly become a much larger problem.

What to Do if Bed Bugs Get into Your Home

If you end up with bed bugs in your home, the sooner you treat the problem, the better. A female bed bug can lay between 1 and 5 eggs per day, and it takes about 10 days for an egg to hatch. That means that, even if you only have a few bed bugs in your home, their population can grow rapidly.

Unfortunately, regardless of the number of bed bugs in your home, they are notoriously difficult to treat. They are fantastic at hiding. Many have become pesticide-resistant, making many DIY chemical treatments ineffective, not to mention a health hazard for your family.

Get Help from the Professionals

The best thing you can do in the event that you discover any signs of bed bugs, is to call a professional pest management company like Russell’s Pest Control.

Russell’s offers bed bug treatments that involve three steps.

  • A thorough inspection to make sure your bed bug problem is actually a bed bug problem and not the result of another pest.
  • A review of our findings to discuss available treatment options based on what we discovered.
  • Appropriate heat remediation treatment to eliminate every bed bug in every stage of development, from the eggs right on up to the adults.

If you think you have bed bugs in your home, contact us immediately. The sooner we can take care of the problem, the easier and cheaper it will be!

Where Are These Moths And Beetles In My Pantry Coming From?

Where Are These Moths And Beetles In My Pantry Coming From?

With winter in full swing, we don’t expect to see hoards of insects in our houses. They can certainly be a problem in the hot summer months, but they should all but disappear in winter, right? If that’s the case, then where are these moths and beetles in our pantries coming from?

How Moths and Beetles Get into Your Home

Believe it or not, some pests don’t get into your house by making their way inside from outdoors or by hitching a ride on the backs of your pets. Some pests get into your house because you bring them in. Indian meal moths and saw toothed grain beetles are two such pests.

Commonly put into the category of pantry pests, Indian meal moths and saw toothed grain beetles most often get into your home without your knowledge. A simple trip to the grocery store may be all it takes to bring them back home with you.

How Pantry Pests Get into Your Home

Pantry pests often begin their journey to your home at food processing plants. They get into common pantry foods, such as flour or cereal, and lay their eggs. Once those foods are packaged up and sent to grocery stores, you may end up putting one of the contaminated items in your grocery cart, then bring it home with you.

There’s often an uptick in pantry pest problems during the holidays. With all the extra baking that goes on during that time of year, people tend to have more baking ingredients in their houses, which increases their chances of accidentally bringing pantry pests into their homes.

However, it’s possible to bring these pests home with you over the holiday season and not notice a problem until later in the winter when their eggs hatch. At this point, you’re likely to see their larvae in your pantry goods, or you may notice the moths and beetles themselves flying and crawling around.

How to Avoid Bringing Pantry Pests Home With You

While it’s impossible to know for sure if the groceries you bring home are infested, you can do a few things to lessen your chances of a pantry pest outbreak:

  • Inspect items at the store. If a bag has even a small hole, it may mean pests are inside.
  • Inspect the foods themselves upon returning home. You can’t open bags and boxes at the store, but you can check through the foods when you get home.
  • Store your pantry items in containers that can’t be chewed through.

What to Do if You See Pantry Pests in Your Home

If you notice Indian meal moths or saw toothed grain beetles in your home, no matter their stage of development, give Russell’s Pest Control a call. We can eliminate your pantry pest problem so you don’t have to worry about contaminated food or an increased spread of the problem from one item to another. Keep your home insect-free this winter, the way it should be! Call Russell’s for more information.

How Rodents Get Inside Eastern Tennessee Homes In The Winter

How Rodents Get Inside Eastern Tennessee Homes In The Winter

Do you consider your home to be secure? If you have locks on the doors and windows, outdoor lights, and possibly a security system or camera set up, you probably feel good about your safety. However, there are intruders lurking about this winter that won’t break in through the front door. If you’ve ever wondered how rodents get inside your Eastern Tennessee home, we have the answer.

Why Rodents Get Inside Eastern Tennessee Homes in the Winter

In the warmer months, rodents are not often a concern. You may see them outside once in a while, but they’re unlikely to get into your home because they don’t need to. So why do they enter homes in the winter? When the weather turns cold, they begin to look for warm shelter. Even if they’ve already found a relatively warm spot to nest, they may decide to move if the area where they currently live doesn’t offer a steady food supply. Chances are, your Eastern Tennessee home offers both shelter and food.

How Rodents Get Inside Eastern Tennessee Homes in the Winter

In order for rodents to make the transition from outdoors to indoors, several things must happen:

  • The outside of your home must be appealing enough to make them want to investigate further. A yard that has a lot of areas to hide, plentiful food, and easily accessible water sources will attract rodents.
  • Once rodents have made it into your yard, they will move closer to your home. If there are easy ways to access your roof or there are areas around your foundation that allow for entry, they will check them out and, most likely, end up inside your home.
  • Once inside, rodents choose a secluded spot to build their nests. Wall voids, attic spaces, and cluttered storage areas are all favorite spots for rodents.

How to Keep Rodents Out of Your Eastern Tennessee Home in the Winter

To prevent a rodent invasion, you need to start by making your property unappealing to rodents:

  • Keep your grass trimmed short.
  • Remove lawn debris and wood piles so there are fewer places for rodents to hide.
  • Cover garbage bins with tightly fitting lids.
  • Don’t leave pet food outside.
  • Remove bird feeders.
  • Make sure there is no standing water on your property.
  • Cut back tree limbs so they do not touch the exterior of your home.

You also need to make sure your home doesn’t have any obvious entry points. Smaller rodents, like mice, can fit through a hole the size of a dime, and all rodents have the ability to nibble on a small hole to make it big enough to squeeze through.

  • Cover or cap all obvious holes, such as chimneys, vents, and downspouts.
  • Check for and repair damaged roof shingles.
  • Inspect your foundation for cracks and holes, and fill any that you find.
  • Check for gaps around windows and doors, repairing those you discover.
  • Repair torn screens.

What to Do if Rodents Get Inside

Sometimes even our best precautions aren’t enough to stop rodents from getting inside. If they do, it’s important to call a pest management professional to help take care of the problem. Russell’s Pest Control can safely eliminate your rodent problem while also identifying how they were able to get inside in the first place, helping to prevent future infestations.

You can also save time by calling Russell’s to do the prevention work for you. Our Power Programs keep your home safe from over 30 pests. Give us a call to learn more.