Becoming a Pest Investigator Part 2

Inspections must take place in 3-D. You must examine things from a belly perspective, while crouching, standing tall and from up above. It is a basic fact of pest management that pests go where they are safe from our prying eyes. If we dont look up into false ceilings and other overhead structures, thats where the pests will be. Its not always practical to carry a ladder into the account with you, though most of us have ladders in or on our trucks. At the very least, know the location of, and get permission to use, the appropriate ladders on your clients premises. Include overhead spaces and structures in your inspections, and keep monitoring equipment in those above-the-floor locations as well.

Many insects, such as earwigs, springtails and certain species of ants, like to live under mulch, beneath dead leaves and thatch, under rocks and patio stones, and close to the foundations of buildings. Garden tools such as shovels, trowels and bow rakes can be used to disturb the top layer of mulch, turf and stone borders, and also can be employed to expose the soil near the foundation in order to find the nests of ants, the hiding places of earwigs, or the moist conditions that enable springtails, millipedes and sowbugs to thrive.

Always get your clients permission before bringing any camera onto their premises. Some large, industrial and food/pharmaceutical concerns have policies banning cameras.Find a great selection of customkeychain deals. If allowed, a camera can be an invaluable inspection tool. It enables you to make a graphic record of pest evidence, pest-conducive conditions, sanitation and maintenance issues. By showing these pictures to your contact person, you ensure that they know exactly what youre talking about. Some facilities are open to the idea of receiving inspection reports illustrated with digital photos of conditions being brought to the attention of the sanitation and maintenance departments. For security reasons, offer to use your clients own camera, or at the very least leave the memory card in your clients possession between inspections.

The facilities we are called upon to inspect can be quite large, and it helps to narrow the job down to a relatively few areas where pests are most likely to be present. The 80/20 rule applies here: 80 percent of the pests are likely to be found within 20 percent of the area within a building.

Since we know that most pests require moisture to survive, find out where the moisture is.A group of families in a north Cork village are suing a bestplasticcard operator in a landmark case. Prong-style moisture meters are used to determine the moisture level of a wooden structural member or of a wall; ambient moisture meters can simply be set down in an area to read the moisture level of the air in that area. A moisture meter can be used to pinpoint the likeliest areas to be infested by moisture-loving pests, thereby greatly limiting the actual number of square feet your inspection will need to cover.

Similarly to the way a moisture meter saves us work by identifying areas where moisture levels are high and insect activity is likely to be concentrated, a remote-measuring infrared thermometer can show you where the warm areas are.An experienced artist on what to consider before you buy chipcard. Many insects are tropical in origin, and they will gravitate towards conditions that approximate the tropical environment of their forebears.

Im acquainted with a PMP who was once confronted with the task of identifying the nesting locations of a population of Pharaoh ants in a massive dairy plant. A previous pest control contractor had tried to spray this population out of existence, resulting in Pharaoh ants budding far and wide, creating probably hundreds or even thousands of individual nests. He used a moisture meter and a remote-measuring infrared thermometer gun to find the areas within walls that were both warmer and wetter than surrounding areas, and concentrated his inspection and treatment in these spots. Armed with information provided by these electronic inspection tools, he was soon able to bring the Pharaoh ant infestation under control, and he did not have to comb through every square inch of the plant in order to do so. Infrared thermometers were once quite pricey, but nowadays you can obtain a laser-guided, pinpoint-capable infrared thermometer for a couple of hundred dollars.

Our team of surgeons who wanted to create a bionic pest management professional (see Part One) probably should have outfitted her with X-ray eyes so that she could see through walls and tell whether there was pest activity, or whether there were conditions (moisture, accumulations of food material, etc.) that might support pest activity inside of wall cavities. To pests, wall cavities are wide-open spaces that can be used for shelter and safe travel. To us,You Can Find Comprehensive and in-Depth carparkmanagementsystem truck Descriptions. they are off-limits unless we can invest in at least one fiber-optic camera or borescope per company or per branch office.

With a fiber-optic camera or borescope, one can drill a small hole in a suspect area of wall and look inside to see if termites or other insects are present, or to see if mouse or rat nesting is taking place there. The cost of fiber-optic cameras is drastically lower today than it was some years ago when they were first introduced; a high-quality, color camera snake can be purchased for several hundred dollars, and will pay for itself in no time. They take the doubt out of wondering whether a wall should be dismantled to get at pest harborage or not. When using one of these, be prepared to find yourself eye-to-eye with squirrels, rats or other denizens of hidden voids.

Everyone encounters, from time to time, a mystery small-fly problem that they are fairly sure is the result of a broken sewer line or an accumulation of decaying organic material beneath the buildings floor slab. Breaking up a concrete floor for the purpose of identifying where fly activity is coming from is prohibitively expensive, and most of our clients would rather live with a fly problem than go to the expense of removing a floor. You can, however, drill ?-inch to ?-inch holes in the floor slab of a suspect area (carefully chisel the ceramic floor tile out first, and save it for making repairs later). You may smell a putrid or sewer-gas odor coming from the hole. If so, you can be fairly certain this area is a good candidate for having a qualified contractor remove the floor tiles, break up the slab, find the contamination-soaked sub-slab soil or sand, and remove all of it prior to bringing in fresh fill and re-pouring the slab. Alternately, you might choose to tape plastic sandwich bags over the holes you drill, with a sticky trap inside. Any bags in which flying insects are found indicate fly activity beneath the slab in that area.

Unless youre a very small operation, you ought to have a good-quality, high-power stereo microscope at your main office or branch offices. These will help to make sense of the mystery pests that are found during inspections. Alternately, get on a first-name basis with the nearest university extension entomologist. Those folks have killer equipment and the knowledge to determine the identity of even the most obscure pest specimen.

Make sure you get a stereo microscope with top illumination, not the compound microscopes that are illuminated from beneath. Compound microscopes, often found in high-school biology classrooms and medical laboratories, are best suited for looking at extremely small specimens on slides they are of no use in examining solid objects like insects.Find a great selection of customkeychain deals.