Your Pest Exclusion Guide For 2015

What is pest exclusion? It is a method of keeping bugs, rodents, and other wildlife away, by hiding food sources and making your home feel less like their natural habitat. This can be done in a number of ways. Here are some of them.

1. Keep your grass cut. To a poisonous spider, cockroach or other small insect, your yard can seem large and foreboding--and that is how you want it to be. If your grass is tall, insects will feel safe to encroach upon your home.

2. If you have construction material, firewood, toys, or other clutter, bugs will use those as staging areas or nesting sites as they come in closer to your exterior walls. By keeping your yard neat and uncluttered you can exclude many common household pests.

3. Leaf piles, sticks, or other natural items laying on your lawn will provide breeding sites for insects. Keep your lawn clear and dry.

4. Door and window screens, weather stripping and door sweeps are first step prevention for exterior walls.

5. Use a caulking gun to fill in rotted holes and cracks around fixtures.

6. Pest don't eat the same things we eat. By understanding what is food to bugs and wild animals you can better exclude them from your home. Most bugs like sug ar, especially if it is natural sugars produced by rotting food. Keep your trash cans covered at all times. Plus, wild animals passing through your yard will move on if they don't find an open trash can, or human food lying around.

7. Keep fruit in the fridge till you're ready to eat it.

8. Put your dishes in soapy water rather than stacked next to the sink.

9. Keep floors and rugs clean. Crumbs are a feast for an insect.

10. Deep clean the sides of your oven and under your refrigerator, periodically.

11. Wood eating insects are hard to exclude, but if you keep firewood away from your exterior walls and elevated off the ground you can make your home less of a target. Some termite species prefer soft, rotting wood. Keeping areas repaired can go a long way to keeping termites, carpenter ants, mice and other wood chewing pests out.

12. Some insects eat other insects. If you have exterior white lights, consider replacing them with yellow, insect-resistant ligh ts. If you draw in flying insects you will also draw in creatures that eat those insects, like spiders.

13. Keep your pantry dry and ventilated, and rotate pantry food, eating the old items first.

14. Always examine food before buying it from the grocery store. This will prevent pests from hitchhiking into your home.

15. Another bug that likes to hitchhike is the bed bug. Check periodically for bed bugs by examining sheets for blood stains, inspecting mattress edges and corners for black fecal residue, and watching for mosquito-type bites that are in a row or patch.