Evicting unwanted guests: Keep pests away from your home as weather warms up

Springtime means warm weather, plenty of Columbia Basin sunshine and flowers blooming in the yard. But this time of year also brings some less welcome guests in pests, insects and rodents.

Travis Billbe has been doing pest control in the Basin since 1997 and is a technician with Yakima-based Weaver Exterminating Services, which handles pest control services for eastern Washington and eastern Oregon.

While the full-service pest control company serves customers year round, he said calls pick up around March, particularly with residential customers. Ants, wasps, yellow jackets, rodents and spiders are probably the most prevalent pests he said he deals with, and he’s already noticed rodents have been bad this year.

“Ants and wasps are almost guaranteed in the Moses Lake area, so we’re seeing quite an uptick in those right now, actually since March,” Billbe said.

Pavement ants and odorous house ants, sometimes referred to as “sugar ants,” are two of the biggest pests, he said. For starters, he said a good way to help deter a problem with ants around the house is to reduce clutter.

“Wood piles, just seems like a lot of junk around people’s houses they like,” Billbe said. “I know composting is a big thing now, and if you have a compost pile, keep it away from your house. Ants, rodents, yellow jackets, they all like compost piles.”

In addition to sealing up any cracks, crevices or access points around the home pests might sneak into, he suggests keeping shrubs and trees near the house cut back at least a foot or two.

These shrubs and trees near a building or home can act as highways for the ants or even rodents. Wood piles, scrap wood from weekend projects, and other clutter can be hotbeds for pests, such as rodents, ants or spiders.

“Bugs and mice, they’ll find that and they like that,” Billbe said. “You want to eliminate any pest activity near the house as best you can.”

“Make them go to your neighbor’s house,” he joked.

Rodents often become a big problem for residential areas in the spring and fall due to the agricultural activity in the fields driving the mice elsewhere, and leaving pet food outside may attract rodents.

Mikal Terry is account manager and sales inspector with Wenatchee-based Pointe Pest Control, which serves the Columbia Basin. Terry said the main pests he deals with include: black widows, hobo spiders, jumping spiders, pavement ants, odorous house ants, pill bugs, earwigs, centipedes, millipedes, box elder bugs, house mice and deer mice.

While Norway rats are a prevalent problem in the Wenatchee area, Terry said he’s started to see sporadic calls about roof rats in and around Moses Lake and the Columbia Basin. These rats typically can be found in attics or crawl spaces.

“Rats are super agile, they can jump four feet in the air; they can jump like a squirrel six feet, extremely, extremely intelligent,” Terry said.

With any pest, eliminating their food source is key to keeping them away from your home. With rats and other rodents, he said people feeding birds in their backyard can be a huge factor. Terry said people don’t realize they’re basically setting up an “all-you-can-eat buffet” for these mice and rats.

Since they’re at the bottom of the food chain, Terry said rodents are typically most concerned with raptor predatory birds outdoors and will often look for a place with cover to navigate like near a fence in the backyard.

“If you can keep that open, I’m not saying chop your trees down, but just make sure it’s clear under there,” Terry said.

Keeping clutter reduced around the house and keeping a well manicured yard can help a lot in keeping pest problems minimized.

For wasps and yellow jackets, now is the time of year when the queens start building those nests and colonies after winter. Travis Billbe said yellow jackets like to build nests in cracks, voids or even old rodent burrows.

Paper wasps will build nests almost anywhere.

“You can have a wheelbarrow upside down for a couple months, paper wasps will probably build a nest in that,” Billbe said.

He said you probably won’t get rid of every wasp nest, but you can get rid of quite a few. Now is the time of year to deal with these flying pests -- when the nests are small and before the numbers become too much to handle.

For spiders and black widows, a lot of the same tips that help reduce ants and rodent issues are useful. Black widows like to have a lot of activity around structures and can find their way into your garage.

Billbe said there are a variety of other pests he gets calls about, but most of them are less frequent. Elm seed bugs are a new invasive species he said he’s dealt with recently and has seen most often in the Soap Lake area.

Billbe said his company tries to focus on using the Integrated Pest Management (IPS) approach, an environmentally-sensitive way where pesticides are used only as a second option when other methods aren’t feasible.

After 27 years, Billbe said he could write 100 books on pest control and nothing surprises him anymore. He said if people let pest problems get out of hand now, they’ll inevitably call him or another pest control service before long.

Terry said when people call is when things can get expensive. He said he recommends someone call if they have a pest problem they can’t get under control right away, and the best pest control is preventive maintenance.

Casey McCarthy can be reached via email at cmccarthy@columbiabasinherald.com.