Five Mistakes People Make With Pest Control

One

Treating What You Can See

This is the big one, and it applies to almost every pest on this site.

The ants on the worktop are foragers; the colony is outside under the paving. The fleas you can see are perhaps one in twenty of what is in the property, because the rest are eggs, larvae and pupae in the carpet. The mouse you caught was not the only mouse. Spraying, swatting or trapping the visible part feels like progress and changes nothing at the other end.

Everything that works does so by reaching the part you cannot see — bait carried back to a queen, a treatment that survives in the carpet long enough to catch the next generation, proofing that closes the route rather than removing the animal using it.

Photographs on this page are for illustration purposes only.

Two

Cleaning Up the Evidence Before Anyone Sees It

Entirely understandable, and it costs you the survey.

Droppings show where the run is. A trail shows where the ants come in. Smearing on a pipe shows how long it has been going on. The mattress seam tells a bed bug story that nothing else does. Wiped away, all of that is gone, and the visit starts from nothing.

If you have to clear something for hygiene — and in a kitchen you sometimes do — photograph it first, and leave one run intact somewhere it does not matter.

Three

Using a Repellent When You Wanted a Treatment

A lot of shop-bought products repel rather than kill. For a householder that distinction is invisible, and it is the single most damaging thing you can do to your own job.

Repelled ants move their trail to a route you have not found. Repelled cockroaches and pharaoh ants scatter through the structure and, in the case of pharaoh ants, the colony splits and you end up with several problems instead of one. Bed bugs disturbed by a spray move to the next room.

If you have used something already, say so when you book. It is not a telling-off; it genuinely changes what the technician expects to find.

Four

Waiting to See If It Settles Down

Some things do go away. A single wasp in the kitchen in October is not a nest. A few flying ants on a warm July afternoon are gone by teatime.

But mice breed on a three to four week cycle with young breeding at six weeks, fleas complete a life cycle in a carpet while you wait, and a wasp nest that is a nuisance in July is hundreds of workers by September. For those, waiting is not neutral — the job gets bigger and more expensive at a rate that surprises people.

Carpet moths are the worst of it, because there is no noise and no nuisance at all until the carpet has a bald patch in it.

Five

Sealing the Hole and Calling It Done

Proofing is essential and it is not a treatment on its own.

Two things go wrong. First, the material: expanding foam, filler and mastic do not stop teeth, and a rodent will be back through in days. Closing a gap properly means wire wool, mesh, cement or metal. Second, the timing: sealing a building with something inside it leaves the animal in there, and the next call is about a smell rather than a noise.

The right order is find the routes, deal with what is already in, then close the routes behind it.

Short answers

Questions, Briefly

Where to go next

The Pages That Answer This