House Broken: Part I: Pests

1998: My House, Just After I Bought It

I bought my little Pine Lake house in 1998 and it's been a champ. Aside from a couple of faucet leaks, and a water heater that blew out, the house has been pretty much trouble-free. Knock on wood, no huge problems to date.

That doesn't mean there aren't irritations. No. 75-year-old house will be perfect. The irritations consist of pests and small things that go kablooey.

Let's talk about pests first, huh?

Pests

I've learned to deal with the pests, and in some cases to more or less live with them. First, the insects.

Ants

When tiny ants appear on the kitchen counter, as they do every year about this time, I buy a package of Grants for Ants stakes and place them outside every six to eight feet to a distance of 20 feet or so from the problem. They're easy to push into the ground and it helps to cover them with a little leaf litter. After three days or so there are far fewer ants, and after a week there are no ants to be seen. That's because the worker ants find the food in the stakes and take it to the nest, where it quickly kills the queen.

I like the stakes because of their targeted delivery. The stakes have only a tiny hole, and they're sturdy, so it's unlikely any creature with a backbone will get into them. They were made of metal until a few years ago. Now they're plastic, but I've yet to find one that has been burgled by a possum or other wild critter.

Not so with the Terminix stakes I bought at Lowe's last week. They're flimsy, and I found two of the six I set out had been broken open. Alas, I've not been able to find Grants for Ants lately at Ace Hardware, Home Depot, or Lowe's, my three go-two places. I was ready to order some on Amazon, but discovered I could have them delivered to a Home Depot store and placed an order.

The Grants stakes last about three months. If you use them it would be wise to set a schedule for replacing them. I generally change them on schedule, especially during the warm months, but I couldn't find them and the ants arrived, predictably, three months after I set out the last stakes.

The stakes are inexpensive, ten for seven or eight dollars-- although Home Depot ship to store now sells them in lots of four for around four dollars.

The stakes work just fine with both sugar-and fat-eating ants, but I doubt they would work with big ants. Happily, I've never had an invasion of large ants, so I can't say.

There are lots of other products that control ants, and I've tried quite a few of them. The Grants stakes are by far my favorite.

Termites

Termites can be a problem in the South, but control is straightforward. I'm certain my house had termites, with the worst problem at the rear, in the laundry room. I knew there were termites when I found a half-dozen or so winged termites there. Clearly, there had been a swarm.

I had an expensive treatment done seven or eight years ago, which means it's probably past time to have the house treated again.

I've been buying targeted bait stations from the do-it-yourself pest control store on Hwy. 78. The stations, which cost about $25 each, are placed around the perimeter of the house, much like the Grants stakes-- but they're buried. They have a top which is the devil to remove if you don't buy a special tool which costs, surprise, $25. Inside are two cubes of untreated wood. The stations should be checked every three months or so. In most cases the wood is still there. If it isn't, that means termites have found them. It's time to go back to the pest control store and buy more cubes-- but this time the cubes are treated with poison. The worker termites transport the poison to the nest, where it kills the queen. It seems a cost-effective and non-polluting way of taking care of the little pests.

Carpenter Bees

I don't remember seeing carpenter bees my first few years in Pine Lake, but when I had fascia repaired and left the wood unpainted they began to bore perfectly round roles 3/8" in diameter. They lay eggs inside these holes. When hatched, the larvae dig tunnels, eating through the wood. It's bad news.

I've not been able to afford metal trim to cover the fascia, but painting the wood has helped a lot. The holes can be plugged with 3/8" lengths of dowel. Just push the dowel in as far as it'll go and saw it flush with a Japanese saw.

Spiders

For the past couple of years I've had an infestation of mostly tiny spiders. They string their webs behind furniture and in other out of the way places. Happily, they've not yet made their way upstairs. I hate to do it, but I'm thinking of setting off bug bombs in the front and back rooms.

The spiders don't really harm anything, but it's irritating to find a mass of cobwebs when you pull the clothes hamper out to empty it.

Palmetto Bugs

I hate freaking palmetto bugs, and yet there seems to be no way to get rid of them.

Palmetto bugs look like huge roaches, but unlike roaches, they live outdoors. If they would stay there that would be fine, but they enter homes in search of water. The die quickly, but until they do they're unsettling. It's creepy to watch one crawl down the curtain while you're watching TV or bounce off your chest as it flies.

Palmetto bugs don't get into my house often enough to be a huge problem, but they're definitely an annoyance. I may go two months without seeing one, and then there will be three or four in one week. Mostly I find them upside down and dying on the floor, but for every four I find dead I'll see one live one.

I occasionally spray Demon XP around the perimeter of my house. I hate doing it, but I hate those icky palmetto bugs more.

Mosquitoes

For the past four or five years the mosquitoes in my yard have been particularly bad. I'm not sure why. They swarm around me when I go outside, especially when it's gloomy.

I've made sure there aren't any sources of standing water in my yard, or in the neighbor's yard. I suspect the English Ivy in my yard, and the neighbor's, holds enough water to be a breeding ground. I'm researching ways to control mosquitoes, and I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Varmints

Rats

I've never had mice in my house, but I did have an infestation of rats. I heard them in the water heater closet and thought they might be squirrels. When a dozen cherry tomatoes disappeared from my kitchen counter I was even more certain it was squirrels-- but a month or so later I moved the VCR on the counter and found gnawed tomato husks behind it. It was rats all right.

By that time a generation of offspring had come of age. There were lots of rats,and they were having parties in the water heater closet. I could often see a naked tail when I peeked inside.

I made a grocery store run for D-Con and put a big container in the water heater closet. It was empty within ten minutes. A second was empty within 30 minutes, and a third container was half-eaten before the critters were satiated.

Within a day or two the rats began to die. I found a dead rat on the front porch. I found a dying rat in the middle of the library floor. I found a rat at the side of the house. I found two dead rats in the water heater closet. I found a dead rat near the door to my tiny attic. And unfortunately, one died in the overhead above my only bathroom.

There was an odor for a few weeks, but it was bearable. It eventually went away (I found the dessicated carcass a couple of years later).

There were no more rats, hooray!

Over the next few years several rats managed to get into my house, but they quickly found the D-Con and quickly died. I eventually got smart and searched until I found a rat-sized hole just beside the water heater. I considered cutting a piece of wood to block it, but rats have sharp teeth, so I covered the hole with a piece of sheet metal and placed two bricks on the top. That was perhaps five years ago, and there have been no more rats.

My total cost for rat eradication was perhaps $10 for D-Con, $5 for rat traps, and $5 for contact traps that proved useless. I spoke to the lady who was living across the street. She said her house had a rat problem and she had spent $5000 to get rid of them-- and still had rats. I asked her why she didn't use D-Con and she said she didn't want to use poison. I didn't either. But I placed a house without rats ahead of a house with rats.

Rats are extremely sensitive to poisons. They're omnivores, and are always trying new sources of food. If something makes them the least bit ill they will avoid it and other rats will watch them and avoid it too. The active ingredient in D-Con is brodifacoum, a blood thinner that is more potent than the original ingredient, Warfarin. The bait thins the blood of the rats that eat it. When they're bitten or scratched by another rat (this happens often), they will bleed out. Even if they don't get scratched they'll die because their blood won't stay in the capillaries.

I just learned (by checking D-Con's website) that the EPA announced in March, 2013 it intends to remove D-Con from the market. Why? Because if improperly placed it can be eaten by pets, children, or other animals. That's unlikely to happen if the bait is hidden under something that is cat-, child-, and infant-proof, but then again there's no shortage of idiots, and so the EPA is acting. I plan to go right out tomorrow morning and buy a lifetime supply of D-Con. Why? Because there's absolutely no other rodenticide that is effective. Poisons, especially are ineffective against rats-- but not so much so with dogs, cats, and babies, and some of the rat-control products that will soon proliferate contain poisons with no antidote. The effects of D-Con can be mitigated with vitamin K, applied over a couple of months.

Then again, the government hasn't invaded our homes and snatched our incandescent lights, so maybe the EPA will back off. I hope so.

Squirrels

Ten or so years ago one or more squirrels decided to dwell in my living room wall. I installed a net under the eave and there was no more problem-- until the little buggers found a way into my attic. I can hear them in the overhead from time to time, but they don't seem to stay. I've set live traps for them, but haven't yet caught one.

Squirrels are dangerous in homes because they gnaw wires and can start electrical fires.

Other Critters

I've encountered lots of other animals around my house in my 15 years in Pine Lake, but I've not considered them pests. One Sunday morning I opened my garbage can to find an opossum looking up at me. I had last put garbage in the can two days earlier, so most likely it had been trapped for 48 hours or so. I tipped the can over. It was about 90 seconds before the possum (opossums aren't the brightest creatures in the world) realized it was free and sauntered off.

Cats tend to hang out around my house, perhaps because they find tantalizing things under it. They get in my shed and knock stuff off the shelves, they terrorize the squirrels, and they were always after my koi when I had a pond, but they run away when they see me and aren't really a nuisance. I do wish they would stay out of my shed, though.

I know Pine Lake has been plagued with wild dogs, but I've never seen any. Nor have I ever had my trash cans turned over. Knock on wood.

One day, back in pre-insurance lizard days, I discovered a gekko in my living room. I was delighted. Gekkos hang out in houses in the tropics and eat flying insects, so more power to them. When raking leaves I found a ground snake. I left it alone. I once found a baby turtle. Ditto.

And oh, yeah, if you're the sapsucker that's responsible for the line of punctures in my Bradford pear tree, knock it off.