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Hey everybody, welcome back to the podcast. Today, I wanted to discuss something that seems to have been kind of on an increase in terms of phone calls that we’ve been receiving on our phone lines, messages that we’ve been receiving through our website from customers. So I felt like it was something that needed to be addressed again, and wouldn’t hurt to give you some information. On but today we’re going to talk a little bit about fleas. Now fleas are, unfortunately, a very common pest a lot of people have experience with a lot of people have difficulty with at some point or another. You can have difficulty with fleas if you have pets of your own, and even sometimes, you can run into situations where you have problems with fleas, even if you do not actually own any pets. And I’ll discuss a couple of those situations. But just a couple things about fleas to make you think about the fact that they can actually balloon from a very small problem initially up to something that seems like you just cannot get rid of them. And this is because, for example, if you have pets, dogs, cats, if you have those animals living around your house or inside of your house, a domesticated animal, those fleas typically like to feed on the animal. Not saying that you wouldn’t see a flea in your house. You wouldn’t see a flea on your body at some point or another. It’s definitely possible, but as long as there’s a host food source, such as your pet, to take the brunt of the problem, most of the time, you may go a long time without really even noticing that you have a problem or that your pet has a problem. A lot of times, people discover it, though, when something happens and the pet is removed from an environment, say, the pet passes away.
You know, something happens where you have to rehome that pet.
You know, just various different reasons why you may no longer have that cat or dog inside your house, but as soon as the food source that pet is taken away, now, all that the fleas have left to feed on, unfortunately, is you so, you know, like I said, a lot of times, it balloons into this big problem, or people don’t even know that they have the problem until it’s a little bit too late. But female fleas alone can lay anywhere between four to eight give or take eggs after each time they feed on your pet or you. And in the grand scheme of things, they can lay somewhere between four to 500 eggs throughout their entire life cycle, and that’s just one female adult flea. So if you have multiple you can see where it could just seem like something that you may not ever be able to get rid of. And that’s not true. There are definitely methods that are successful in getting rid of fleas, but it definitely feels like a mountain that’s a little bit difficult to climb. So let’s talk a little bit about this. What are some ways that we can get rid of fleas? There are a lot of DIY people in the world, and there’s nothing wrong with that. I am on that same Avenue with many different projects around my house that I try to protect into and saving some money and that sort of thing. But if not done correctly, you can actually exacerbate the flea problem and you can actually make it completely worse.
You’ve heard me say it on the podcast many times. This will not be the last time I say this. I tell my customers all the time. Just because a product says you can kill fleas with it, or you can kill roaches with it, or any of those pests, doesn’t always necessarily mean that that product should be used to kill that particular insect. So sometimes these products actually have an effect on making the insects seem like it’s worse inside your home, for example, if you use a product labeled for cockroaches on certain types of roaches, like German roaches, and it’s.
Wrong style of product, you may actually cause those roaches to relocate to a different room in your house that you never actually had a roach problem in up till that point. And the same can go with fleas as well. So number one, if you want to get rid of fleas, and I tell my customers, is if I’m going to treat their house, this is number one in the discussion where I talk to my customers, you have to get your pet treated for the fleas, and you need to maintain regular flea treatments on those pets. Unfortunately, the way it works, we can certainly treat a house for fleas, but if the host is no is never treated or maybe just given a flea bath and not given some type of, you know, medication from the veterinary office. If there’s not some long term treatment plan for your animal, there’s a high likelihood that those insects will be back and you’ll have a problem again in the very near future. So that’s that’s number one we always recommend to the customer. Hey, please get your animal treated.
You know, sometimes it’s a situation where maybe you don’t have a pet, and you move into an apartment, you move into a rental house, and you end up finding that there are fleas and that even though there hasn’t even been a tenant in that rental property or that apartment for months. That’s because fleas can actually lay dormant. Eggs can lay dormant and not hatch for around six months or even longer, sometimes depending upon the temperature and the environment that they’re in. So I mean, you could even move into having a flea problem where you didn’t have pets to begin with, or maybe even in your yard if you had a neighbor that breeds dogs. I’ve seen this before in some of my customers where the neighbor whose yard backs up to my customer’s yard actually was breeding dogs and ballooned flea problem in their yard, which kind of spilled over into my customer’s yard, where they were getting bitten, eventually even transferring into my customer’s house, which was a big problem. So get your animals treated. Encourage your neighbors, friends and family, to have their animals treated so that they don’t have flea problem. But that’s only the first step. So at pesky we have an awesome Flea Treatment Program. I have yet to come across a time where we employed this program and it did not work for the customer. It’s very effective. We’ve got a lot of experience doing it, and we treat every single house the same way when they have a fleet problem. So initially, what we go in and do we make sure that the homeowner, family members, pets, all of those things are out of the house at the time of the treatment. And the very first thing that we do is come in with a vacuum, and we have a pest control vacuum, a special one designed specifically for that purpose. And basically what it does is upon pulling those insects and those eggs and even some dirt and dust and all with it, upon pulling those up into the vacuum and actually locks them inside of a bag where the debris sits to where they cannot actually get out, and they’re not loose inside the vacuum container or anything like that. So basically it pulls it into this bag where we’re able to then take that bag and dispose of it in a manner where it’s not going to reinvest the customer’s property. And so we vacuum all of the floors. It doesn’t matter if it’s got carpet on it. It doesn’t matter if it’s a rug. It doesn’t matter if it is a hard floor, wood floor. Doesn’t matter. We vacuum all those surfaces, because even the smallest gap, crack, crevice in a floor or in a carpet allows for fleas to hide, and it also allows for harborage areas for those fleas, egg eggs. So we also vacuum upholstered furniture as well couches, chairs and kitchens or dining rooms, recliners, Ottomans, anywhere where those fleas can be, anywhere where those eggs can also be attached to. We vacuum all of that stuff. After that, we come in with a two part liquid treatment. Now this is another important reason why family and pets needs to be out of the house, because this product needs time to be applied, and then it needs time to dry. Now, once it dries, it is considered okay to contact, so that two part liquid treatment actually has two different active ingredients that we use, the first being an adult decide or a pesticide that’s actually going to kill those adult and younger fleas that it comes into contact to but the neat thing about it is this is that the second ingredient has a more long term life cycle breaking effect, and that’s called an IGR, which stands for insect growth regulator, hormone. So those two ingredients come.
Cobbled together and applied in the problem areas where you have fleas, does amazing work and getting getting rid of those fleas. Now I will tell you, most people, when they come home from my testimonials, where I’ve spoken to customers after the fact, say that they see instant results. That’s because we have vacuumed up a huge amount of the population, and then we’ve also liquid treated. However, you have to consider this, it’s a little bit of a more long term game to get rid of fleas, because, like any insect, fleas lay eggs. Any insect that lays eggs has larva inside of it that are completely protected from the effects of pesticides. There’s not any pesticide on the market that can penetrate inside of the egg of an insect, and that specifically also goes for fleas. So sometimes these products actually cannot affect an insect, larva or egg, until that egg hatches, and then, once it does, either they contact the adulticide, and it actually kills the the in the recently hatched flea, or it contacts the growth regulator. And what that IGR does is it inhibits a larval or nymphal stage insect, like a flea, into inhibits it from being able to grow into an adult, biting egg, laying flea, so eventually it breaks the life cycle. What I like to tell my customers about the Flea Treatment is that once we are done, you can roughly expect that product to continue to work, you know, as long as it’s applied. But I like to tell them to help us out for the next seven to 10 days, that post treatment instruction is going to be number one. We don’t want to that, or, excuse me, we don’t want to mop any of that product off of hard floors. We want that product to stay there and work for as long as it needs to work. I always encourage my customers to vacuum. Most everybody has a vacuum these days that has a removable canister. You know, you suck up the dirt and debris off the floor, you take the canister, and what do you do? You typically immediately walk over to your garbage can, dump it in the garbage can, and you don’t think anymore about it. But the problem is, is that if you vacuum up adult fleas or live fleas that for some reason, have not contacted that product, and you put them in the garbage can inside your home, you still run the risk of, you know, reinfestation, or at least prolonging the time that it’s going to take to solve that flea problem. I always tell my customers, hey, take that canister, dump it into a couple of, you know, grocery store sacks, or into a Ziploc bag, something that you can close up or tie up and dispose of those insects and that debris in an exterior garbage can, maybe that you’re going to be sitting by the road, that’s going to be picked up by the garbage men wherever that you live, and then that way, they don’t have an opportunity to reinfest or stay in your house with you. And then roughly, after those several days of vacuuming every day and even vacuuming multiple times a day, you should see the population go down and you shouldn’t have a problem anymore, as long as you do what I mentioned in the beginning of this podcast, which is get your animals treated. Now the unfortunate thing is, is you can control your pets. You can control what happens inside of your residence, but unfortunately, we can’t always control what happens in our neighbor’s residence around us, we you know, we can’t control what they do with their pets. We can’t control what they do with their environment,
but there are some treatments that are available for the outside of your house. As from a pest control perspective, we’ve done everything from granular treatments that go into the grass and the soil around your house that you know, once watered in, release a product into the grass that kill fleas. We’ve also gone and done liquid treatments in the yards for fleas as well. So there are options available to you. However, if you do have a neighbor that’s got a flea problem in their yard, and that problem is spilling over into your yard, then, unfortunately, it may be something that has to be done on a more frequent or regular basis just to continue to provide that long term control that ultimately, anybody who has had a flea problem is searching for. So I hope that I provided a little bit of insight for you today. We’ve had some very severe and significant flea problems that we have been able to completely knock out rather quickly with just the methods that I described to you that we use now. Lastly, I will say, for those DIYers, years ago, before I was ever involved in Pest Control.
So I had two dogs. My wife and I had two dogs that were living inside the house with us, and of course, they’d go out of the yard every so often, but we’re primarily indoor dogs, and inevitably, we ended up with a flea problem. And I did. I went to the store, I bought a spray that was in the pet aisle. Says that it eliminated fleas. I don’t even remember what was the active ingredient, but I did. I sprayed it all over my hard floors, all over the house, let it dry, and lo and behold, the flea problem was still there. It was almost like it did not do anything. So if you are up for a little bit more of a primitive challenge, as opposed to using pesticides or sprays or contacting a pest control company, there is a more interesting way to get rid of fleas that I did try, and it does work, and it was pretty cheap to do. So what I actually did was I went to the store and bought a couple of baking sheet pans that you would cook cookies on, or bread or something that you would bake, you know, on. And I bought those pans, brought them home, filled them with a thin layer of water, and set them on the floor. Now, just a layer of water in a pan is not going to do anything. However, if you take a few drops of dishwashing liquid and you drop it into the water, it causes the surface tension on the water to break so a flea on a regular body of water can float or stand on the water because of surface tension. However, the moment that you put dishwashing liquid in that water, it breaks the surface tension, causing any flea or insect that lands on that water to immediately fall to the bottom and drowned. So I would take this dish filled with a little layer of water, filled with a couple of drops of dishwashing liquid, and I would put a lamp, a small desk lamp, over the water with it turned on and I would leave it. And fairly quickly after I did that, you could see fleas beginning to go towards the heat of the lamp and jumping towards that lamp, they would literally hit the water and sink and drowned. Now I did this with multiple pans and a couple of lamps for just a few days, and eventually we did not have a flea problem any longer. It does work. It does take diligence and it does take time, but if you’re willing to stick with it, it does work. So I hope these tips have helped you, I hope these recommendations have helped you, and I hope that we’ve shed some light on why flea problems exist, how they can balloon out of control, but how they can actually, in fact, be controlled, and you will not have a flea problem any longer. So if you’re dealing with fleas or general household pests, termites, bed bugs, mosquitoes or more, feel free to give us a call at pesky pest control. We’ll be more than happy to talk to you about it, come out and see what we can do for your property and get that pest problem eliminated just for you.
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