Podcast Transcript:
Michael Wienecke: All right, so what are some summertime pests that you have seen that have just been—or coming up summertime pests?
Travis McGowin: I mean, the summertime gets everything moving. Everything from roaches, crickets, silverfish, earwigs—I mean, a lot of things that we just haven’t seen throughout the fall and winter months or hadn’t had any issues with. It’s now like they’re all coming out in full force again. I mean, not even to mention, you know, mosquitoes—we’re already seeing those, and it’s only halfway through March yet, so.
Michael Wienecke: I’m just glad that the Asian lady beetles are starting to kind of—kind of go away.
Travis McGowin: Are they? Are they, though?
Michael Wienecke: Well, you know, there’s a lot of videos out there about—about them, so I don’t know if they’re going away, but it—at my house, they’re going away.
Travis McGowin: I still have a couple lingering here and there. A lot of them have died, personally, here in my office. I’ve got a couple still crawling around on the ceilings, it looks like, but I have a very large amount on the floor that are dead. So, but they’re getting annoying, still.
Michael Wienecke: You know what my favorite pest to treat in the summertime is?
Travis McGowin: You have a favorite pest. What’s that?
Michael Wienecke: Favorite pest.
Travis McGowin: What’s that?
Michael Wienecke: Earwigs.
Travis McGowin: Why earwigs?
Michael Wienecke: Because earwigs are a moisture problem, and most people—it’s kind of crazy because like, we look in our forums and stuff off Facebook and all that, and people post earwigs all the time and they don’t know what they are because they’re—they look prehistoric, you know.
Travis McGowin: Well, you know where they get their name from, though, right?
Michael Wienecke: Oh yeah, yeah.
Travis McGowin: Yeah, so for those listening that may not know where an earwig gets its name from, it was thought years and years ago that the earwigs would burrow into people’s ears to lay their eggs. And so there was this—this unfounded fear, which is—don’t get me wrong, any type of insect has the potential to crawl in your ear. I mean, you do enough research online, you can see where people have roaches—
Michael Wienecke: Ugh, roaches, yeah.
Travis McGowin: —spiders and stuff.
Michael Wienecke: That was like my biggest fear when I found that out. Of like a roach just flying into your ear and like you having to go to the hospital and get it removed. I’d just be like, oh, that’s disgusting.
Travis McGowin: Right, right. And from what I understand, having something crawling around inside your ear canal is not comfortable by any means. But any—any roach or earwig or whatever insect that’s small enough can go into your ear canal if it gets the opportunity to. But like I said, the—the idea was that that was where they went and laid their eggs, and they would hatch inside your ear canal, which is just not true. But, I guess the name stuck.
Michael Wienecke: Well, I just think they’re cool. I mean, you know, they’ve got those little pin—pinchers on the back, and they actually do work. I mean, if you put your finger in, they can pinch you. It doesn’t hurt, but it’s just—they’re just cool little creatures, and when they get in people’s houses that—that typically don’t see them, it’s—it’s just something new to them.
Travis McGowin: Well, and rarely—the—the pinchers themselves are not typically used as a defense mechanism for them. They’re actually used to hold their whatever food they have—um, to consume, is more what they’re used for, actually.
Michael Wienecke: Yeah, which is really cool. So, like I said, it kind of looks like a prehistoric scorpion to me.
Travis McGowin: Well, we have those too. We have scorpions too here in Alabama.
Michael Wienecke: We do not see a lot of scorpions, but we do, you know, every now and then we’ll get a house, especially one that’s had a lot of—um, you know, like unearthed—like they’re doing some kind of landscaping or something like that, we’ll typically see some invasions of scorpions inside homes. What’s your least favorite pest to treat?
Travis McGowin: Uh, clarify the question a little bit more for me. So when you say least favorite, are you talking about least favorite in terms of potential difficulty or least favorite in terms of process?
Michael Wienecke: Difficulty.
Travis McGowin: I think my least favorite—and—and this is—this is probably strictly just based upon the fact that reaching them can be difficult—and because they fly, but probably one of the most annoying ones to treat is wasps.
Michael Wienecke: Oh, a wasp. Okay.
Travis McGowin: Yeah, I was going to say wasps, because—and I’ll give you an example. Went to a customer’s house last week that has a single-story house, but there’s some very high eaves—especially above the house in the attic space, there’s just some very high eaves. And you can’t reach it with a traditional pole to knock a web or—not—not a web, but to knock a nest down. Spray has difficulty getting up that high. But, you know, the wasps being that they fly, being that they can get into really small gaps and crevices around the eaves of the house or doors and windows and they’ll inevitably end up in somebody’s house and they’re freaking out because they’ve got this wasp in their house. But there’s—there’s not a lot necessarily, you know, prevention-wise other than sealing things up. I mean, even—even applying a liquid pesticide’s only going to do so much for a wasp.
Michael Wienecke: Well, hold on now, Travis. Now we—we’ve been up on a three-story home, and we’ve sealed out a chimney to keep these wasps from getting in a house. So you can do preventive maintenance. Um, you want to screen things that they can get into—main area’s going to be a chimney, but again, it’s going to be very high up, especially if it’s a—a—a tall home.
Travis McGowin: Right, from a—from a just a general pest control—um, perspective on that, I think that they’re probably one of the more annoying. And—and, you know, obviously they can come at you and sting you—so, you know, there’s that dangerous aspect of it, if you will, especially if you have—you know, an allergy or a hypersensitivity to a wasp sting. But, there again, they can fly, they can go wherever they want to—um, and when they’re out foraging throughout the day and doing their activities throughout the day, you know, they—they can be kind of a nuisance, and—and like I said, unfortunately from a pesticide perspective, there’s only so much that you can do because they fly.
Michael Wienecke: Well, I—I like how you said, you know, so high, you know, our duster pole if we can’t reach it to remove it, but we do also have the—the attachment that goes on the pole with the, you know, where we can either dust—what is it called, a Gotcha Duster?
Travis McGowin: Yeah.
Michael Wienecke: Yeah, the Gotcha Duster—um, you can get an aerosol on there or something, so I have used that to take care of some very, very high wasp nests in gutters and such.
Travis McGowin: Right, right.
Michael Wienecke: But I would agree with you on difficulty, that would be—that would be one that’s not really—that’s kind of hard to treat because like you said they fly, but also the difficulty level of finding them.
Travis McGowin: Well, and there’s the—the preventive aspect. So let’s—let’s really talk about that. So from a pest control perspective, what we do when we come out for these quarterly services or we come out for these monthly services is an attempt to not only treat what it is that the customer may or may not be having a problem with, but it is also to prevent things from coming in or things from happening so that there is no, you know, pest inside or there’s no infestation that builds up. You know, and there’s a lot of pests that we can target preventatively. I mean, if you look at a house that has shrubbery, flower beds, mulch beds, those kinds of things where it’s conducive place where roaches and crickets and silverfish and earwigs want to live, but we can liquid treat and we can put out bait granules and that sort of thing, there’s a lot of preventive measures that can be taken. But something like a wasp, I mean, if they fly over and land on your house, I mean, you know, halfway up the side of your house, I mean, you know, there’s really no preventive for that.
Michael Wienecke: No, not at all. Um, perfect example in Chelsea, Alabama—um, had a customer that had every year in the summertime right around this time they get—they get wasps in their house. Um, they signed on with us, they haven’t had it for the last two years, but did an inspection, found out where they were getting in, and they had an issue where the—the roof was a little raised up and they were just right in there able to get into that—that attic space, and then of course they were in the house. So dusted that area, got that treated, and they have not had a problem since. So that’s—that’s good.
Travis McGowin: Right. Yeah, and flying insects, man, that—that unfortunately is—is going to be one of the ones that do pose more of a challenge. I do know that I have heard from some customers that previous companies they may or may not have had, you know, at one point, there’s some companies out there that don’t even try to fool with or cover wasps.
Michael Wienecke: That’s what I was going to say. Yeah, yellow jackets, wasps—any stinging insect, I mean, they won’t touch it.
Travis McGowin: Right. And so, you know, we’re one of the—we’re one of the few, of course. I’m always a big proponent of communicating with the customer, setting realistic expectations, um, trying to provide a solution for the customer where they understand, you know, this is what you should or should not expect. And that’s one of those things—wasps, you know, we can—we can do some hopefully preventive things or pesticide-type things, but ultimately they fly and they go where they want to go.
Michael Wienecke: Speaking of flying insects, I—I did learn something. If—if there’s a yellow jacket nest in a wall, do not remove the tape over the hole in the wall, because they—they will come out in droves.
Travis McGowin: Who put the tape there?
Michael Wienecke: The customer.
Travis McGowin: Oh, well, smart on—smart on them.
Michael Wienecke: Well, I went to remove the tape and—and the little bitty, you know, they had eaten out the hole back of the wall. So when I removed the tape, it just disintegrated and thousands and thousands of yellow jackets. So we had to do some—some shoving pillows under doors and all that and keep them—keep them contained.
Travis McGowin: Well, let me—let me just say, I have had some yellow jacket experiences that I mean would—would probably be out of the realm of like nightmares, if you will. Several years ago had a customer that called me and—and they were actually a customer but they were also a family friend, so I had my cell phone number and they called me and they said, “Hey, we’ve got a yellow jacket issue inside of our house.” And I’m like, “You sure it’s yellow jackets?” They’re like, “Absolutely. It’s yellow jackets.” I said, “Okay,” and this was on a Sunday, so I said, “What time are y’all going to be around tomorrow? I’ll come by the house tomorrow, we’ll take a look at it.” And they’re like, “No, you don’t understand. We’ve got hundreds—
Michael Wienecke: Emergency!
Travis McGowin: —hundreds of yellow jackets inside of the living space of the house.” And I said, “All right, I’ll be there in a little bit.” So loaded up, went over there. This was prior to my possession of a bee suit, by the way.
Michael Wienecke: Oh, wow.
Travis McGowin: Probably not—probably not the safest ordeal that I’ve ever been involved in. You know, I spent 11 years as a fireman and this was probably more dangerous than half the stuff I did as a fireman. So I went up into the attic, okay, and if you do some research you can find that—that some yellow jacket colonies can have, you know, kind of what they term is like a super nest—massive nest, multiple queens, just ever-expanding, ever-growing nest. So we—first of all, on the outside of the house, in one of the corners of the eaves was just this massive built-up paper, you know, chewed-up paper nest like they build, almost looked like hornets for a minute but it wasn’t. And it actually expanded and extended through the eave up into the attic space. And so at the time I wish I would have got more pictures of it. I do have some pictures somewhere. But I got up into the attic and tried to treat, and I did only get stung one time in the attic.
Michael Wienecke: I’m impressed, because I’ve been stung with a bee suit on, so that’s very impressive.
Travis McGowin: I know. Knowing what I know now, that was not a good idea. So but I got stung one time, went back down, did some treatment—and then actually ended up having to come back a day or two later because they were still some alive and eventually got it annihilated. But I do have pictures of this too somewhere, but the—the yellow jackets when they build up enough into the attic they actually chewed through the sheetrock. And that’s where they—there was a corner of like a ceiling and the wall in the kitchen—or dining room, and they actually chewed through and made their way into the house while the customer was gone, and then when they came home that’s when they found all these yellow jackets.
Michael Wienecke: Yep, that was in Mountain Brook. Same—same deal, they had chewed all the sheetrock out and like I said it just disintegrated. So well, I think we found our topic—I mean, we can talk about wasps, you know, coming up summertime and that’s what’s about to be just buzzing around everywhere. So they’re pollinators, that’s one thing I think we’ve talked a lot—lot about, and—and you have to understand that they—they are going to be flying around this summer. They’re going to do what nature intended, just like honeybees, they are pollinators—um, as well as pests. So they’re here, and they’re here to stay.
Travis McGowin: Right. Um, you know, big thing to remember about yellow jackets too—more so than wasps. Now I—I will say wasps will build nest in shrubbery—um, a lot of times people only kind of mentally think wasps build under eaves, porches—um, inside of solid objects, but no, they will actually build nests in—up inside of shrubbery. I’ve—I’ve been treating houses and actually accidentally bumped a bush and had, you know, 18 of them come out at one time on me, so that is a possibility. But big thing about the yellow jackets is when you’re mowing your grass, when you’re doing any yard work—flower beds, shrubberies—keep in mind that a large majority of these nests are inside a hole, you know, through a hole into the ground where there’s this chamber underground that they’ve dug out and built. Um, and there can be—I mean, just population-wise, depending upon the size of the nest, I mean there could be hundreds in there.
Michael Wienecke: Oh, I’ve—I’ve dug hole—I’ve dug nests out that were, you know, bigger than basketballs.
Travis McGowin: Right, and they’re—they’re just nonstop. Um, but you know, if—if one of them stings you, they release an alarm pheromone. And that pheromone can trigger you to have many, many more stings—um, and also kind of trigger a pursuit of you by the other yellow jackets. So, you know, as you’re getting back out into the yard as we unfortunately have seen that warmer weather appears to be here to stay, much to my disappointment—
Michael Wienecke: Eighty degrees is—is weird for right now.
Travis McGowin: —it—it is, it is. I shouldn’t be sweating watching baseball on the bleachers, but here—there we are. Um, but as you’re out there doing these things, you know, just be mindful and cautious—um, and be careful, because you know yellow jackets in—in a high enough volume could potentially really hurt you or even kill you, maybe.
Michael Wienecke: Oh, yeah, yeah. No, I—I think, you know, I always tell anyone that if they are allergic, they need to carry an EpiPen—um, it’s kind of a must. Um, it’s—it’s just not, you know, as us being firemen, you know, anaphylaxis is not—is not a good thing.
Travis McGowin: Absolutely not. Um, and you know, for your kids to be getting out in the yard and playing and all that—I mean, I’ve—I’ve even had a time where I was at a customer’s property treating for ants. I was treating the house for ants, and I was standing in the yard next to the house, and I don’t know why I happened to glance down but I did, and I—my boots were standing basically almost on top of the entrance of a yellow jacket’s nest.
Michael Wienecke: Landmine!
Travis McGowin: Yeah, right. The customer was standing on the front porch which was probably four or five yards away from where I was standing talking to him, and I was the one standing on the mouth of the nest, and I did not get stung a single time and he got stung several times. So I got lucky on that one, he did not get as lucky on that one either and then ended up having to, you know, treat yellow jackets that day too instead of just nests. But it’s just that simple, it can happen that fast and you just don’t even see them.
Michael Wienecke: One hundred percent. Well, and something to understand too is, you know, around this time of year, start spring summer, we’re going to start seeing them just foraging too. So just because you see them in your yard kind of buzzing around low—low to the—does not mean that you have a nest inside, you know, around your yard. They could just be out trying to get a food source, looking for water—I mean, there’s tons of different things that they could be doing. So that’s something—don’t—don’t just kind of freak out if you see them buzzing around your house because that might not necessarily mean that you just have an infestation in your yard or around your house or anything like that.
Travis McGowin: Well, and speaking of other things that cause people aggravation, how about fire ants?
Michael Wienecke: Oh, man, that was—so that was mine, Travis, is ants. Um, every type of ant. Except for carpenter ants. I really like to get rid—carpenter ants don’t bother me so much. But fire ants, Argentine ants—um—
Travis McGowin: Pharaoh.
Michael Wienecke: Pharaoh ants, yeah, those would be the big three really. The fire ants, you know—um, I—last year my son fell in a fire ant bed, so they—I’ve got a special—um, you know, I just—I want to get rid of all of them, so.
Travis McGowin: Well, I—I—I can kind of agree with you on the carpenter ant ordeal. I feel like that’s about the chase, almost.
Michael Wienecke: I like carpenter ants. I think they’re very cool.
Travis McGowin: Well, it’s—and it’s like a hunt.
Michael Wienecke: Yeah, yeah.
Travis McGowin: You know, I’ve had multiple carpenter ant customers where they were seeing them in the house, they looked, couldn’t find a nest, and then of course go do a little digging around the outside of the house and find this, you know, damaged tree not far from, you know, the house that’s—you essentially go kick the tree and out come the carpenter ants, you know. Um, so it is—is more of an investigation. But the fire ants—um, obviously from an aesthetics point of view, they’re—they’re making big mounds in your yard—unsightly, you’re hitting them with a lawnmower, you’re stepping on them as you walk—so there’s that. But, you know, from a—a danger perspective, I mean especially if you have young children—
Michael Wienecke: Yep.
Travis McGowin: —you know, if they were to accidentally step in it and not realize it and just stand in it or God forbid sit on it accidentally, which I have heard of happening—
Michael Wienecke: Nightmare.
Travis McGowin: —yeah, you—you could talk about some serious allergic reaction—and obviously the pain aspect of it. I mean, I don’t like getting hit by an ant by one, you know, in the yard mowing grass or something like that. So I can’t imagine, you know, having 20, 30, 40—40 of them on you at one time—um, you know, I could see where that would be very painful.
Michael Wienecke: Well, how satisfying, though, is it to run over them with a lawnmower? Because I did it—I did it over the weekend and I—I did too and it was—it’s just—it’s sat—it’s a satisfying, you know, just that cloud of dust and all those ants just—going—
Travis McGowin: Such a sick—
Michael Wienecke: —going into oblivion.
Travis McGowin: —such a sick individual. Well, you know the good thing is, though, is if you are—if you are dealing with a fire ant issue, there is hope.
Michael Wienecke: There is hope. Um, honestly the only way to get rid of fire ants is treatment. And—and I don’t even recommend, you know, just treating one—one nest. I mean, we have that—that full guarantee 100 percent—um, gone for a year—you know, I use it on my yard, you’ve used it on your yard—we love it.
Travis McGowin: Oh, it absolutely works like a charm. And I promise you here over the next month or so, um, it will be reapplied to my yard, because I—I noticed last spring I was out my yard, I think we were doing yard work and I just happened to notice that there’s these mounds piling up everywhere. I’m like, “I don’t typically worry too much about my yard—at least in the past I haven’t—but no sooner did I notice that I literally went and got my spreader, hit my yard with the product, and haven’t seen an ant mound in my yard since because the product stays here for a year.”
Michael Wienecke: You just got to protect—you got to protect that little girl, man. I mean, you know.
Travis McGowin: Oh, right, right. But the product stays here for a year. Yeah, yeah. And when we say that, it legitimately stays here for a year. I have not seen an ant mound in my yard in almost a year. It’s amazing.
Michael Wienecke: It is amazing. I mean, it—it—it works, it works great.
Travis McGowin: Right. And as simple as—as, you know, a pest because it’s a restricted-use product, but as simple as a pest control company coming out, spreading it, making sure it gets watered in whether that’s by the company, by the homeowner if they’ve got sprinkler system, whether it’s going to rain here in a little while and get a good little rain to come in and water it in, but somehow water it in—and then no ants for a year. No fire ants for a year.
Michael Wienecke: And then of course you go the warranty—I mean, we always back everything we do, so the warranty is—is so important. If—if by any chance they do come back, we come back as well.
Travis McGowin: Right. So I guess to sum up this whole conversation, we—we know that the pests are coming. The weather is warming up, they’re going to be out and about. They’re going to be seeking for, you know, places to get into your home—um, whether it’s ants, roaches, silverfish, earwigs, crickets, whatever ails you—um, whether it’s wasps in your yard, yellow jackets in your yard, soon to be termites coming out and about for people discovering they have termites, unfortunately.
Michael Wienecke: That’s a fun hunt.
Travis McGowin: It is. But whatever ails you, we pretty much have a solution for you.
Michael Wienecke: We sure do.
