The Most Common Pests in Milton Keynes Homes

The shortlist

Six Things Account for Most of It

Milton Keynes is a young city with a lot of estate housing, a great deal of block paving, mature planting and a river valley running through it. That mix produces a fairly predictable set of problems, and six of them account for the large majority of what we are called to.

• Mice — the most common of all. Autumn onwards, every year, in every kind of property.
• Rats — fewer calls than mice, but bigger jobs. Gardens, drains, lofts and under floors.
• Wasps — a hard seasonal spike from July to September, then nothing.
• Ants — May to August, almost entirely black garden ants coming in from outside.
• Bed bugs — year round, rising, and the one people most often get wrong at the start.
• Fleas — year round, worse in warm weather, and not always from a pet in the house.

Behind those come carpet moths, cockroaches, squirrels and cluster flies. They are less frequent but they are not rare, and carpet moths in particular cost people real money before anyone notices.

Photographs on this page are for illustration purposes only.

Rodents

Mice and Rats Are Not the Same Problem

People say rodents as though it were one job. It is two.

A mouse gets through a gap about the width of a pencil, lives in the fabric of the building, nibbles at many points in a night rather than eating one meal, and breeds fast. You usually know from droppings along a run and scratching in a wall or ceiling at night. Mouse work is mostly about finding and closing gaps, because the gaps are why they are there.

A rat is a bigger animal that generally comes from outside — a garden, a neighbouring plot, a defective drain — and works its way in. It is warier of new objects than a mouse, which is why a rat job takes longer. You are more likely to hear heavy movement, find a burrow, or see smearing along a regular route.

If you are not sure which you have, the droppings settle it: mouse droppings are 3 to 6mm and scattered; rat droppings are more like 15 to 20mm and left in groups.

Insects

The Seasonal Ones and the Year-Round Ones

Wasps are the sharpest seasonal spike we see. A nest started by a single queen in spring is nothing much until July, and then it is suddenly hundreds of workers and everyone notices at once. Wasp nest treatment is the one service on this site with a published fixed price, because it is the one job that is genuinely the same every time.

Ants run from roughly May to August. What arrives in a kitchen is a foraging trail, not a colony — the nest is almost always outdoors, under paving or at the base of a wall. That one fact is why spraying the line on the worktop achieves nothing lasting.

Bed bugs and fleas do not care what month it is. Both are rising, both are usually brought in rather than wandering in, and both take more than one visit to finish properly.

Carpet moths are the quiet one. The damage is done by larvae, in the dark, under furniture and along the edges of a room, and by the time anyone sees a moth flying there is usually a bald patch in a wool carpet already.

What to do

The Useful Thing Is Noticing Where

Whatever it turns out to be, the most useful thing you can do before anyone attends is note where. Which room, which corner, what gap, what time of day. A photograph is worth more than a description almost every time.

That is not a formality. For mice and rats the entry point is the job; for ants the trail leads to the nest; for bed bugs the seam of the mattress tells you how long it has been going on. A survey that starts with a location is a much shorter survey.

Short answers

Questions, Briefly

Where to go next

The Pages That Answer This