Along with being some of the cutest little fuzzy-faced animals, they're also filthy, disease-carrying vermin. Those baleful eyes belie the murderous virus carried in their urine & feces. The CDC lists a few other nasty germs carried by rodents, and anything that ends in "syndrome," or has the word "renal" in it should make you think about ways to rodent-proof your home.

• Hantavirus Pulmonary Syndrome
• Hemorrhagic Fever with Renal Syndrome
• Lassa Fever
• Leptospirosis
• Lymphocytic Chorio-meningitis (LCM) 
• Omsk Hemorrhagic Fever
• Plague
• Rat-Bite Fever

For whatever reason, the rodent calls have been legion this November, with calls coming in nearly every single day from concerned homeowners finding rodent droppings everywhere from the garage to kids' bedrooms to the kitchen. You definitely don't want rodents in any of these places, as their droppings can carry diseases for years, and their fleas carry their own set of concerns.

Vole on top, deer mouse on bottom. Preferring to be called "larger-boned" to "fatty-fatster," the vole also has a lot more fur, since it spends the whole year outdoors.

Voles, not gophers, leave the trails in your grass that end in a 2" hole in the ground. They don't come inside as often, preferring to damage your property outside. They're even active underneath piles of snow. You'll see large patches of dead grass and rings around saplings where they ate under the snow all winter long.

Ah, who doesn't like a great, early 90s rock ballad? There must be someone out there who doesn't, and we both know hearts can change. While the typical ebb and flow of calls asking for help with flies, aphids, elm seed bugs, and the like are now definitely in the "ebb," we still have calls coming in. So what is it that people are concerned with when it's cold at night, and plenty cool during the day, and it's frequently raining?

Gravel and rock bed weeds. Right now, look for sprouted weeds, in the only-measurable-in-millimeters stage of growth. Some of these hardy plants sprout and wait out the winter. If treated with a sturdy preemergence chemical now, it'll cut them off at the roots (literally), and make February's application that much more thorough.

Bed bugs! Blood suckers have to eat, too, and fortunately, ours is 98+ degrees even in winter.

Basement and crawlspace pests. Spiders, some ants, and lots of different hemiptera (bugs) and beetles will overwinter below your home. If this displeases you, we can help.
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Rodents. Mice do quite nicely this time of year, snuggling up in the garage, under the dog house, out in the tool shed, and, if you're like a dozen other customers this week, somewhere between the kitchen and the laundry room. Be sure to keep pet food put away and sealed in an airtight container during the day (this will also help with ants), and make sure you have the cracks beneath doors fully sealed, to discourage access.

Now see if you can get Axl's voice out of your head by the end of the day, and call us for all your pest and weed control needs!

It's cooling off. Leaves are turning & dropping. Arthropods are slowing down, right? Then why are we getting so many calls on wasps, bugs (hemiptera), and spiders?

Lots of insects live through the winter. To survive, they either must produce a blood-borne anti-freeze or dig down and go into a super-low metabolic state or just come inside your house, which is the preference for lots of the critters!

Think about it--would you rather spend the cold winter in an old, rotting log, or go into a nice, toasty house that smells like food?

Centipedes and spiders are notorious fall invaders. Seeking out a livable winter home, your crawl space, basement, or even main floor make fantastic places to set up shop, and there's usually enough little bugs around to survive indoors until March. Ditto for sage bugs, stink bugs, and lots of other invaders, although they're not predators.

While they often pose no real risk to us, they're still creepy, uninvited, may bite us, and not paying any rent. My vote? Evict with extreme prejudice.

A fall In & Out treatment works like a charm. It cuts down tremendously on the bugs that bother you. It helps reduce the number of yellow jacket queens that make it alive into your attic. It cuts down on ants, spiders, and a huge number of other annoying critters.

But what works best is a 4x/year plan. The bugs don't make it past our defenses in the first place. And if they do, we don't charge extra if you need an extra visit! Think about it--we treat once inside & out, and from then on, we keep the treatment to the outdoors. We only come inside your house if you need us to--that's pretty handy, especially if you're like most people, and have a job to go to and a family to shuttle around.

The cost isn't that much--usually around $159 for the first treatment, and $89 to $109 per quarterly visit after that (outside-of-town pricing will differ).  Ants in the kitchen in December? No extra charge. Spiders in the corner of the basement? Gotcha covered!

Call 800.422.4803 and let us schedule a free quote for you. And have a pest-free fall!

In the U.S., "ladybird beetle" is finally catching up to "ladybug." While not a true bug in the hemiptera sense, many people really don't care that certain qualifications must be met for an arthropod to be called a "bug."

We see them all spring and summer, and they sort of make you smile, these busy little beetles, all pretty and friendly. Except, how friendly are they? Back in the early 1980s, a local municipality always had us treat the aphids in the trees that overhang the city pool. One year, they opted instead to purchase ladybird beetles and release hundreds into the trees to control the aphid using a natural method.

In theory, it was a great idea. Those hungry little meat-eaters ate aphids by the thousands, and within a few weeks had the situation well in hand. In fact, they completely eliminated their food supply, and not willing to go hungry, they began biting the children in the pool! We were then reluctantly contacted to "see what we could do" about the problem of angry ladybird beetles attacking the kids.

Voracious predators, most species are fantastic at search-and-destroy methods versus aphids and mites, both of which can cause your plants extreme stress and death. Provoked, they can deliver a nasty pinch to a human as well, but it's not very common.

Usually appearing as soon as it gets a little warm in early spring, ladybird beetles continue to procreate until it's too darn cold to do so. That means it's not impossible to see larvae on the leaves of a tree late into the fall in our part of the world. And since the larvae look so strikingly different from what you normally see on a typical walk through the backyard, we frequently have alarmed customers asking us to come treat the caterpillars devouring their leaves!

​Once we see the larvae chomping away on the aphids, leafrollers, and other damaging insects, we explain that they're doing a good job, organic solutions, yadda yadda yadda. Sometimes, however, their presence is too little, too late. If the tree is truly stressed from a late-summer aphid attack, the hearty beetle may be unable to catch up to the aphid population, and a well-timed systemic injection can then kill the aphid just as the larvae pupate, meaning the aphid will die before the majority of ladybird beetles emerge as adults.

So if you see this battle-hardened larvae on a leaf on your tree or your garden, let it continue fighting the good fight in the perpetual eating contest that defines this predator.

But we find them frequently around the gutter areas around the eaves as well, where they're waiting for unsuspecting prey to fall into their clutches. Often, when performing a pinstream application under an eave, one will drop down on a strand, having been disturbed from an afternoon nap. They come down with such speed and size that even though we see hundreds per week in our line of work, it still makes us jump a little!

Poisonous vs. Venomous vs. Dangerous
Someone asked us recently how poisonous they are, which means a little 'splainin is in order. Poisonous refers to a toxin that is absorbed, ingested, or inhaled, while venomous refers to toxins injected into you by an animal.  For example, poison ivy isn't venomous, and eating a rattlesnake isn't poisonous.

There is still much research to be done on whether individuals can react to spider venom the way individuals react to bee or wasp stings. While not everyone reacts the same way when stung by a honeybee, it may be that some humans are more allergic to toxins within spider venom that others don't react to at all.

In this part of the world (Eastern WA, Northern ID, Northeastern OR), the only verifiably spider dangerous to humans is the black widow. It was once thought the hobo spider was dangerous, but it was shown long ago that there's nothing in the venom of Tegenaria agrestis to make it any more dangerous than any other spider in its genus, which fits the typical pattern. 

Special thanks to Gary Larson for teaching the world about the emotional depths of arthropods.

If you've ever ridden your bicycle in the Inland Northwest, you're acquainted with puncturevine. This bane of the backyard is on everybody's black list, and we get calls from late spring to late fall as it takes over more and more of the parking lot, alley, vacant yard, etc.

Tribulus terrestris is a formidable foe, all alliteration aside. It doesn't begin to germinate until it's hot--usually in the high 80s. As soon as it does, it pays to kill it fast, as its entire life cycle can be completed as quickly as one or two weeks. That means it can go from a nasty goat head seed in your driveway to a green plant producing more nasty seeds in 10 days or fewer.

And dang those seeds! Tough enough to deflate your tire faster than you can say, "oh crap," its seeds are even more evil on the paws of your dog and on your own bare feet.

In 2016, we had a few days in the 90s in the month of April--that set up the plant for a l-o-n-g growing season that led to even more plants than usual. Typically, people start to watch for it in late June or July, but remember:

​Plants and insects don't care about our calendar. Or tires. Or dog paws. They only care about the weather.

And the seeds can lay dormant for possibly greater than 20 years. So since this enemy can seem to grow without moisture and in the worst soil conditions, what's a responsible homeowner to do about it?

Puncturevine is easy to kill once you see green leaves. A little bit of 2, 4-D lawn weed killer will wipe it out fast--the problem is making sure you remember to do it weekly, and getting it done before it grows 15 feet across and has babies of its own.

Prevention is another matter altogether. We have found some success with certain chemistries, but by the time puncturevine germinates (hot), the season for preemergence chemicals is long since past. Not only that, the odds are pretty slim that the tap root is going to suck up enough preemergence chemical to shut it down before it can die due to its metabolic rate.

​​And why does that stupid neighbor never seem to kill the puncturevine on his side? Probably because he's a lazy nogoodnik, and he's never going to get it.  But here are some ideas that YOU can handle!

("Don't Tease the Mantis" is not a follow-up sequel to The Blue Oyster Cult's hit, "Don't Fear the Reaper," but it should be.)

We've all had that moment when for a split second, your brain isn't sure what you're looking at, and it quickly runs through a few likely scenarios:
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Is that a toy someone dropped?
No, it's a Tinkertoy or something.
Wait--it's a tiny alien, and now I'm freaked out.
Oh, it's a praying mantis. And I'm still freaked out.

There's something unnerving, unnatural, and intelligent about the way the mantids move around that makes a lot of people instantly wary. Their articulating legs, their hypnotic, swaying motion, and the freaky way their heads track you as you walk around them, working up the courage to shoo it away.

It's the worst when you find them at your door, blocking the entrance to your own home. You feel bullied and ashamed that this tiny alien-like arthropod is denying you access to your own property.

As predators of other arthropods, they are beneficial, in that some of the insects they eat probably would have harmed your vegetation. However, a lot of the other ones they eat would have helped your vegetation, so there's debate about how much good they actually do in your yard. They don't focus on a single type of prey, so they end up eating the good with the bad insects. But even though they are freaky, we don't go out of our way to kill this insect.

I'll never forget Mrs. Alan's 3rd grade class. Brian brought in a grasshopper from recess to feed the mantis in the aquarium in the back of the room. The boys gathered around for this exciting learning opportunity which was sure to end in gruesome gore--as much gore as you can expect to get in a 3rd grade class, anyway.

After a few seconds of sizing up its prey, the grasshopper pounced on the mantis, defeated it, and began eating. This is not what we expected at all, but we were still excited to have seen something gross.

So they're not undefeatable! And they're not actually all that ornery, although you can rile them up by poking them with grass, getting too close to their strange heads, or by insulting their mothers.

But if you happen to find one on your leg, like I did last night, you may at first think it's a shoelace. But when kicking your ankle sideways doesn't cause it to fall away, and you look down and see two large eyes looking back at you, you needn't freak out. Just scrape him off onto the nearest bush, and congratulate yourself for being so brave. And the longer it takes your camera to focus at that distance, the braver you are.

When it's 100 degrees out, and you've been working a while, you'll notice a change in your demeanor, and it's not toward being more pleasant. This is doubly true for hornets and yellowjackets, who love making nests on the hot sides of your tool shed and house, and hang their nests in inconvenient heights on tree limbs.

And why do they seem so cranky!? You're out there on your own property, you've tried to be nice, you've tried to live and let live, and then BAM! Your kid got stung just walking toward the pool.

It's tragic, and it happens every summer. And it gets much worse as the summer progresses. As the life cycle of the wasps and hornets that live in your yard draws to a close, there are lots of workers who aren't designed to survive the winter, and no longer have any work to do. As such, they naturally join gangs, harass local property owners, and generally turn into nogoodniks.

​Not so for the humble bee, who still has plenty of work to do, and just wishes these other vespids would quit giving "bees" a bad name. Our goal, when called to a stinging insect job, is to avoid bees, and only target yellowjackets, wasps, and hornets that would potentially be a liability if an allergic family member or passer-by were to be stung.

Remember that when you call, identify the enemy as "wasp" or "hornet," because we don't want to kill the bees. If you do have bees, we call a local apiarist to handle it for you.

There are natural predators of stinging insects. Check out this incredible picture we got of a robber fly that dwarfs a fairly large hornet. He had an incredibly large lunch that day. Imagine the largest hornet you've seen outdoors. That's how big the hornet in the picture above was. Now you can imagine how much bigger the fly was. After eating a meal that big, the fly wouldn't need any more for a while, which leaves us, your local pest control company, to make up the slack. It's a big burden we carry, but we care an awful lot.

The bane of everyone's picnic is, of course, the yellowjacket. They're not shy to invite themselves to any party where there's meat.

​Always after your corn on the cob and your steak, this disruptor can ruin everything quickly. And it's no fun for us, either, because even if you're on a program, they can come over from your neighbors' houses. That's why we recommend you call everyone in your neighborhood to get on our plan!

​Just remind them that quotes are free, and so is the call: 800.422.4803.

The earwig. That ever-present denizen of the rose garden. You begin to see them once it gets warmer--when it's hot enough to dry out their moist habitats, you'll often see them heading indoors, looking for something cooler and hopefully damper.

It all starts in late fall, when a male and a female pair up, and spend the winter together in a pile of leaves, under wood, in bark cracks, in your tool shed, or even an inch or so under the ground. Early spring comes, the female kicks out the male, and she spends a couple days laying up to 80 eggs. Once they hatch, she actually sticks around to take care of them, helping them hatch from their eggs, barfing up breakfast for them--you know, typical maternal stuff--until after their 2nd instar state. Earwigs don't have a larval stage, so they come out as tiny versions of the adult. Each version is called an "instar," and after 5 of them, they're fully-sized and rarin' to go.

Breakfast includes plants, plant leaves, rotted plants, dead animals, and insects smaller than itself. Definitely not a vegan, and the earwig would definitely not give you dirty looks for eating a steak, but they do seem to prefer rotting piles of plant material.

Birds, frogs, lizards, centipedes, and spiders all find the earwig tasty, and are handy to have around the vegetable garden and rose garden.

To date, it has not been documented that an earwig will crawl in your ear and lay eggs to feast on your brains, but perhaps the people who would do the research have already been infected. Or maybe I've been watching too much Dr. Who.  As far as we know, the term "earwig" comes from the shape of their unused wing, which, when extended, forms the shape of a human ear. The "wig" part of "earwig" just means insect, so you can throw out the idea that they used to make their homes in British parliamentary wigs. Although that would be cool, it's unsubstantiated and bad science.

Curiously, I once had a customer believe she had accidentally inhaled eggs one fall when gardening, and was quite certain they were coming through her digestive tract and living in her insides. I inquired how that was possible, since they need oxygen to survive, and how they would reproduce in there, but this line of question was overruled entirely, and she later informed her doctor that I had assured her it was possible.

It's a crazy world, and all the crazier for having earwigs in it. Give us a call if you'd rather not have them around your prize roses, living room, or kitchen!