Are Your Neighbors Causing a Pest Problem?
Whether you live in a standalone home, apartment, or condo, the choices and behaviors of your neighbors make a difference in your life. Do they play loud music at night? Fail to clean up after their pets? Forget to bring the trash bins in? All of these actions make a difference in your life and change your quality of life. In the same vein, your neighbors’ decisions regarding pests can also impact your living space and quality of life.
There is no feeling worse than realizing that your home has been infested with bugs or critters. Bugs can scare children and adults, cause embarrassment, and damage one’s home. If you think that you have a pest infestation, it’s important to act quickly to eradicate the creepy crawlies as soon as possible and address the cause of the problem.
Throughout the year, but especially during the colder months, pests seek warm, cozy homes for themselves and their families. Neighbors living in unsanitary conditions can attract pests into the vicinity, identifying a block, neighborhood, or building as a good home for pests and creepy crawlies. Below, we’ve identified some common pests that might create problems when they travel between homes in a neighborhood or building and provided information about the best way to practice preventative pest control.
Mice
Though mice are not quite as creepy-looking as pests like cockroaches, they are truly miserable pests to have in your home. They love to nest, chew holes in things, leave droppings in your pantry, and make noises at night that for many make it difficult to sleep. Mice look for safe places to nest with food readily available. They find their way into the walls of one’s homes easily, and can nest without being observed quite easily. They often travel at night, making it difficult to track them or even identify that you might have a problem. Mice are known to routinely travel about 50 feet from their nesting area. So, if a neighbor has a mouse problem, it is not unlikely that the mice living in their home might travel to yours and begin to seek refuge in your home or eat your food.
Mice can be extremely challenging to keep out of your home. They can quickly become attached to a food source, and unlike other pests, they are able to gnaw through bags of food to gain entry to a food source more easily. They also multiply quickly, and often aren’t noticed by humans until it’s too late. Start by cutting off their food supply. Store your food and pantry items in plastic containers with a strong, sealable lid. Use trash cans with lids to keep mice from finding food outside your home and then coming inside to make a nest. Then, use traps or recruit an exterminator to help you finish off the rodents. PurePest has years of experience dealing with rodent infestations and helping you sleep easier at night.
Ants
Ants, above anything else, are looking for an easy source of food. Ants enter homes looking for food, which is why they are most often found in the kitchen, munching on leftovers or open food items. They are also interested in trash cans and greasy or sticky surfaces. Once they’ve found a food source, they can also begin to nest in the home. They live in colonies with thousands of other ants, so a small ant infestation can quickly become a much more serious ant infestation. Just a single ant finding a trail of food or finding a food source can lead to thousands of ants in your space. And if your neighbor has an ant infestation, it can very quickly become your ant infestation too.
The first step to making your home less desirable to ants is to make sure you’re putting food away, especially leftovers. An ant infestation can begin with just one meal or bowl of fruit left out on the counter. You should also make sure that your trash cans have a lid that fits tightly and keeps pests out. However, because ant infestations can grow in size very quickly, you may need the help of an exterminator to get rid of ants for good and ensure that they have all been removed from your home.
Cockroaches
Cockroaches are creepy, scary to many, and very difficult to control. They can also cause health problems for humans. Moreover, they’re very difficult to get rid of permanently, often arising seasonally. You can generally find cockroaches in kitchens, near food that has been left out, near drains and pipes, and in the walls or underneath house appliances. Cockroaches can enter your home without your realizing quickly. They tend to seek out warm, moist, hidden places with sufficient food to sustain them and allow them to continue breeding.
In order to get rid of cockroaches, start by cleaning your home. Remove any food or other uncleanliness that might attract bugs or allow them to create offspring. Take away their food sources and clean or dry out their hiding spots. Place food items in sealable containers. By making your home less desirable, they will be less likely to come into your home. However, roaches are just one of the most difficult pests to eradicate. Seek out support from PurePest if an infestation gets out of control before you can seal food sources and entry point in order to eradicate it quickly and not allow it to grow.
Preventing Future Infestations
If you believe your neighbors’ habits may be causing a pest infestation, it’s important to take action to control the things you’re able to control and to make your house undesirable to pests. While it’s important to call an exterminator if you’re experiencing an acute pest crisis, there are also ways to prevent these infestations from beginning in the first place. A long-term pest management plan from Pure Pests ensures that a neighbor’s problem never becomes yours at all, and makes sure that you have someone on your team ready to act at all times.
