Natural Pest control for your Lower Mainland Home
It's summer as of today. And with the warmer weather, it's not unusual to find trails of ants in your Surrey garden, fruit flies in your Burnaby kitchen, mosquitos incubating in your backyard pond, or spiders in your Sunshine Coast Cabin.
I speak from some experience. We've had all of those things happen to us.
in the case of our cabin, my wife got bitten by either a Hobo or Brown Recluse spider. It caused a very nasty bite which took more than a few weeks to heal with some top-shelf antibiotics. In our Surrey home, we've also had the ant problem and fruit flies in our kitchen. Our pond was a natural breeding ground for mosquitos, after the koi that lived there became breakfast for a visiting Blue Heron.
What can you do about these pests? There's always chemical answers, but these days we're all trying to achieve a more natural solution to the pest problem.
As an inspector, if I see evidence of insect infiltration, I'll be directing you for further evaluation by pest control. Ants can be very invasive and love wet, moist wood to chew on.
Carpenter ants are well known for their ability to damage wooden structures. They are also a nuisance in homes as they search for food. They eat both plant and animal matter. Their natural food sources are insects, other small invertebrates, and sweet body fluids from aphids and other insects. Protein and sweet foods found in and around homes also provide food for foraging workers.
Carpenter ants build nests by burrowing into wood. They dig tunnels (called galleries) much longer than those created by termites. The wood is not eaten, but thrown from the nest as sawdust-like shavings.
ANTS
KEEP SURFACES CLEAN
Keep your kitchen counters free of crumbs and sticky spots, cover the sugar and honey jar. Wiping down surfaces can go a long way toward keeping your home pest free!
CUCUMBER
Set out cucumber peels or slices in the kitchen or at the ants’ point of entry. Many ants have a natural aversion to cucumber.
MINT
Leave a few tea bags of mint tea near areas where the ants seem most active.
LOOK FOR ENTRANCE POINTS AND USE NATURAL HERBAL CONTROL
Trace the ant column back to their point of entry. Set any of the following items at the entry area in a small line, which ants will not cross: cayenne pepper, citrus oil (can be soaked into a piece of string), lemon juice, cinnamon or coffee grounds.
LIGHT IT UP
Leave a small, night light on for a few nights in the area of most ant activity. The change in light can disrupt and discourage their foraging patterns.
DE
Diatomacious Earth (often referred to as “DE”) is a talc-like powder that is the fossilized remains of marine phytoplankton. When sprinkled on a bug the fine powder absorbs lipids from the waxy outer layer of insects’ exoskeletons, causing them to dehydrate.
CORNMEAL
Put small piles of cornmeal where you see ants. They eat it, take it ‘home,’ can’t digest it, and expire. It may take a week or so, especially if it rains, but it works and you don’t have the worry about pets or small children being harmed!
HOMEMADE ANT BAIT
Dissolve 1 teaspoon of boric acid and 6 tablespoons of sugar in 2 cups of water. Soak cotton balls in this bait solution. (Boric acid is a low-toxicity mineral, but do keep it away from children and pets because it can cause skin, mouth, stomach, and eye irritation.)
Place one or two cotton balls on an inverted jar lid and saturate with the mixture.
Place the jar lids along ant trails or where ants have been seen.
Replenish the liquid as it dries until the ants are gone.
Be patient! The key is to get worker ants to continually carry low doses of boric acid back to feed the ants in their nest.
FRUIT FLIES
They seem to come from nowhere. You buy some local Abbotsford or Westham Island strawberries, or blueberries from Langley, and wham, little fruit flies in your kitchen. They are pesky little guys, and can be hard to get rid of. I'm not sure about the lifespan of a fruitfly. I've heard it's just one day. But boy, they know how to grow up, procreate and have more offspring. According to researchers at the University of Guelph, the flies have an average life span of approximately 40 to 50 days. Female flies can lay up to 500 eggs during their short life.
How to get rid of them isn't an easy thing. First step is keeping all your kitchen surfaces clean and free of any kind of over-ripe fruit or vegetables, and keep all surfaces, including after dinner plates and food waste washed and put away right after eating. Until they are gone, it might be a good idea to keep even your tomatoes into the refrigerator.
We've tried all of the following, and they work to some limited degree. I think the best way to be rid of the little bugs is to starve them out.
The flies are attracted by vinegar, so what we've done in the past is take some apple cider vinegar, add a few drops of dish soap and create a foamy trap for the flies. It will catch a good amount of them.
Like vinegar, fruit flies love the smell of wine. Try leaving out an open bottle with a little liquid — the skinny neck will keep the flies trapped.
SPIDERS
At our cabin on the Sunshine Coast, we've had some pretty gruesome experiences in spiders. A few years ago, my wife was bit in the middle of the night by either a Hobo or Brown Recluse. When she awoke, there was a fairly large lumpy swelling at the bite site. We west to the local hospital and was told to wait 24 hours. If the swelling burst, we should get back to a hospital asap. Well, one night later, it happened, the lump had exploded into a pus-filled scary mess. We drove down to Surrey Memorial Hospital and was admitted in the emergency ward and had a bed within 10 minutes. The doctor told us it was the first case of a properly diagnosed spider bite that he had seen while practicing in BC. That's how rare they are. We've had the property over 30 years, and this is the first bite.
Hobo spiders are highly aggressive as their name implies and their bites are often misdiagnosed as Brown Recluse bites. They will actually jump at you, and while cleaning at the cabin, I've actually had them chase and try to attack me, while vacuuming.
The key to keeping spiders from becoming a problem is being diligent in your cleaning routine. Funnel web spiders, such as the Hobo and Brown Recluse are actually more venomous than the Black Widow (which we've also seen up there) When we're up at the cabin for the first time, we do a full on-vacuum, cleaning under, around an in all the corners and walls and crevices. One year, when the spiders were bad, we counted vacumming up 26 of them. You may not like to hear this, but you probably have that many in your house as well. NOT funnel web spiders, but simple small spiders that create small webs usually in the corners of your walls. Abandoned webs deteriorate and turn into cobwebs. The next time you vacuum - vacuum up and see what I mean, especially in rooms that are uninhabited. Apparently firemen see thousands of cobwebs when entering a house that has had a fire. The smoke makes all of the webs very visible.
Spiders generally like dark place that are not moved much, such as boxes stored in basements, or woodpiles. The large and scary wolfe spiders enter the house to be dry during the cooler fall season, which is when we tend to be surprised by the large wolf spider. Wolf spiders are unique in the arachnid community in that they don’t spin webs, preferring to hunt for their prey. Big and brown, wolf spiders can grow to be more than an inch long. They do not spin webs. They are voracious hunters, looking for small bugs for the meal. Although they are venomonous, the venom is not strong enough to harm a human — they'll just cause a few nightmares.
There are lots of household remedies to keep the spiders away — how effective they are is unknown to me — I've yet to see the perfect deterrent. I had heard that the spiders hate the scent of peppermint, and went to the local nursery to buy many peppermint plants. Guess who was sitting happily on one of the peppermit plants when I came home? Yup. Mrs. Spider suntanning on one of the leaves.