Manchester & Trafford Pest Control

Archive for the ‘Pest Control Manchester Manchester Pest Control’ Category

Get Rid Of Ants Permanently

Get Rid Of Ants Permanently – Only the unfortunates who have suffered it will know the true terror of winged ants in their homes.
Having an infestation of normal wingless ants is bad enough but when they go through their annual mating  cycle the situation can become insufferable.
Ants often start colonies under the floors and in the wall cavities of our homes and these colonies will continue for many years if left to their own devices  getting progressively more intolerable each year.
Our dwellings are warm and dry and make the ideal places for a thriving ant colony; even ‘solid’ concrete floor is not a problem to an ant.
Our central heating systems maintains their metabolism even in the colder months and my earliest ant call-out was on my birthday, in early January!
Ants love a sandy soil and there are many towns in Lancashire, Cheshire and Manchester which tend to produce more ant problems than others, Southport, Blackpool, Bolton, Sale & Altrincham come to mind as hot ant towns.
Unfortunately it is during their mating period that they are most troublesome. Here in Lancashire, Cheshire and Manchester this tends to be fairlyoften  around the third or fourth week in July.
Ants mate in-flight and around mid-summer the colony produces winged immature Queens and winged males which in  a more natural environment would fly off and mate whilst airborne. Many thousands of these winged ants are produced per colony and nests tend to time  their release so that they mate with ants produced by other colonies.
Invariably this process starts after two or three days of warm, dry weather  and will usually go on for about a week although less frequent releases will continue throughout most of June, July & August.
Unfortunately when the nest is hidden beneath the floor of the property the results can be catastrophic, literally thousands of flying ants are disgorged into the lower rooms, collecting on windows as they head for the light.
This can be extremely distressing for some people leading to extreme emotional trauma to the degree that people learn to fear the summer months and have actually sold their homes to escape the invasion of ants which they know comes each year.
The very wet summers of 07 & 08 has meant that ant call-outs were down on previous years but ants seem to have a way of catching up and 2009 looks set to be a very troublesome year.
Most people who have this problem try DIY solutions with powders from hardware shops etc but usually these efforts are fruitless as they are not addressing the heart of the problem which is the colony itself, hidden away in the cavity wall or sub-floor area.
Fortunately for many people an answer is at hand.
At Harrier Pest Control (subject to site conditions) we are able to solve this problem and give an extendable three year guarantee.
The process which is done mainly from the exterior of the property, is perfectly safe for pets and children and produces no smell, involves drilling small holes into the cavity walls of the property, not unlike a damp-course injection and blowing an pesticidal powder into the cavity walls under pressure.
This forms an impenetrable barrier across which the ants cannot go and along with a precautionary internal spray treatment (if appropriate) will gradually bring the situation under control.
The holes, which are only 8mm in diameter remain open so it is a simply matter of topping up the cavities every three years to extend the effectiveness of the guarantee in three year terms.
This process is best carried out in the early spring however it can be done at any time of year.
As a limited time offer before our busy period starts  we are offering 25% off the standard cost until April 30 2009. Whilst we normally cover the whole of Lancashire, Cheshire and Greater Manchester, we are willing to travel further afield but this will increase the cost.
For a discussion or to arrange an site visit contact Harrier Pest Prevention on Free Phone 0800 019 8382 or

http://harrierpestprevention.com

We destroy wasps’ nests at a fixed fee of £29.50 (except postocdes L, CW & CH £39.50) 7 days per week

Free Phone 0800 019 8382

Pest Control Wasp or Bee?

Pest Control Wasp or Bee? – as a pest controller covering Manchester, Cheshire and Lancashire it has become apparent that there is a great deal of confusion, especially in the under forties between wasps and bees and even between honeybees and bumblebees.

Perhaps in these heath and safety obsessed days schools no longer have the summertime nature rambles of my youth and that is a great pity.

At a distance it is possible to the untrained eye to confuse wasps and honeybees but bumblebees should never be in doubt.

A wasp is any insect of the order Hymenoptera and suborder Apocrita that is neither a bee nor ant but in terms of common understanding we are dealing in North West Britain with just three species which we term wasps, The Common Wasp (Vespula vulgaris), The German Wasp (Vespula germanica) and the relative newcomer termed the ‘Euro Wasp’ (Dolichovespula media).

The biology of wasps and bees is very different.

In the late autumn a wasps’ nest dies out completely and is never re-used. The workers and males die but the newly produced queens hibernate for the winter before waking in the spring to start nest building.

At the first sign of warmer weather the young queens emerge from hibernation and commence nest building, mixing rotten wood with saliva to make ‘wasp paper’ with which to construct the nest.

She will lay 15 – 20 eggs in cells inside the nest and tend these until the first workers emerge to take over the nest building process.

Any reports of wasps’ nests prior to June, and certainly any in late April or May will always turn out to be a bee species of which there are many.

Wasp nest building continues throughout the summer and in the autumn the nest produces immature queens and males which then mate. A single wasps’ nest may produce over 2000 new queens.

The bee which makes the honey unsurprisingly is the honeybee (Apis mellifera) but a staggering number of people confuse the honeybee with the bumblebee (Bombus spp.)

The honeybee has an altogether different lifecycle to the wasp, the entire colony surviving the winter, and hence are seen much earlier in the year.

A feature of the honeybee is the way in which new colonies are formed. In late spring and throughout the summer the colony will produce new queens which split or ‘bud’ from the old colony taking several thousand worker bees with them; these are called swarms and can actually be heard in flight.

This causes alarm in many people who will then ring a pest control company and declare that a ‘wasps’ nest’ has just arrived.

Clearly we know immediately that we are dealing with a bee swarm and can often point them in the direction of a beekeeper who may be able to remove the swarm unharmed.

Contrary to urban myth, and indeed the web sites of many local councils, honeybees are not a protected species in Britain and there are circumstances where there is no alternative other than to destroy a colony.

Frequently they establish a colony or ‘hive’ in a chimney stack and where this is venting a gas fire this is clearly dangerous and it is often necessary to destroy the colony.

After destroying the colony the owner of the property has a legal and moral duty to have any honeycomb removed from the stack as if it is left in place it will be robbed out by wild or commercial hive bees, resulting in the death of those colonies.

A responsible pest controller will not destroy a colony unless arrangements to remove the honeycomb are in place.

The bumblebee has a lifecycle similar to a wasp in that only the new Queens survive the winter and start new nests in spring. A bumblebees’ nest is an insignificant affair, now where near as intricate as a wasps’ nest and rarely contains more than 300 workers at most whereas a honeybee colony or wasps’ nest may have upwards of ten thousand inhabitants.

Another common myth is that bees can only sting once and whilst this is true of the honeybee, the bumblebee like a wasp, can sting multiple times.

Bumblebees are however extremely placid and will only ever sting as a last resort and therefore it should rarely be necessary to destroy a bumblebee nest.

That concludes this article entitled – Pest Control Wasp or Bee?