Speaking of bugs.....

 

Just imagine what a mess it would have been if a thousand uncles were eating on your kitchen counter!
(You'd have to call those spamming guys for a kitchen remodel!)

Herb, it's the same here. I can't even begin to tell you how much I hate bugs. Well, actually, yes I can and I think I will just so you see you're not alone. LOL!!
 
Every year for the 4th of July, NJ gets hit by flying ants. You can't even find out where they come in. It makes my skin crawl. They don't bite, but they annoy you because they fly to the top of your light fixtures and just keep on hitting them making this popping sound. They get in everywhere. Through my window seals, my AC outlets, my ceiling....man, I can't tell you what it does to me. Imagine having a client and the next thing you know, you have 10 flying ants popping all over the ceiling.
 
This year I went out to look at the back of the studio where they seem to be entering. I nearly threw up when I went out there. I have bars on all my lower level windows. When I went out there....the bars were moving. Ever see pictures of a man covered in bees to where it looks like he has a beard? That's what my bars looked like.
 
After insane spraying, I called a friend of mine and had him dig up my ground as far as he could to check my foundation. I had him seal everything he could find...redid concrete, caulked anywhere and everywhere and after I saw all the work he did, I felt good about it.
 
I wasn't done there. Next I called an exterminator friend of mine. I told him what the problem was and he said "dude, you just ain't gonna beat them....it's too hot and it will be a fight to where they win." So I did some investigating...and then called him again.
 
This time, I had him drill into my walls and blow this white powder in the walls. We have "entry" points to each wall that are hidden so that they don't stick out to people. Every 6 months, he comes and shoots this powder in the walls and I've not seen anything since.
 
In my house, I went to take a shower about 2 weeks ago and saw 2 ants in my tub. I went ballistic and though "great, now I need to dig up my house foundation and shoot the powder in the walls here too like I did the studio".
 
So I call my friend the exterminator and have him come over. I was dumb-founded because my house is huge man...and my bathroom is on the second floor. Like WAY UP high in the house. How on earth are ants getting there?! As slow as they walk, it would take 2 months for them to climb that high! Low and behold, the lil baystids were getting in through the pipes!!! We powdered all through the pipes, in through the sheetrock and in any nook and cranny we could find.
 
Next, I set these borax bait stations that literally let the ants take the food back to the colony, they share it and it wipes them out. I put so many of them around my house and my studio, you would think I have a serious problem with an invasion. LOL!
 
I still wasn't done. I figured since I got my friend here, I HATE HATE HATE crickets!! Now we got those camel crickets here too and man, they sooo suck! Really hard to kill as they can move side to side and disappear like a ninja. The regular crickets bother me so bad with that chirp stuff, I cannot finish my work if I hear one. I have to stop doing what I'm doing and search him out. They get in my drop ceiling, hide all over the place and are excellent ventriloquists! So my exterminator friend gets his truck and covers my grass with a blanket of this stuff for bugs, crickets, ticks, fleas, you name it, we're covered.
 
Then he comes in and sprinkles this yellow granular stuff all over, inside my drop ceiling, the garage, behind furniture etc. If I get stuff after this....I'm moving some place cold. Between the bugs and leaving my AC on all the time....I don't know what's worse, bugs and their treatments, or a $600 electric bill due to the AC for home and studio. I used to love summer.....now I can't wait for frost! Death to all bugs! :)
 
-Danny

craigb

Danny Danzi
I HATE HATE HATE crickets!!

Oh no!
 

 

Ok, not him....he gets a free pass always. He sort of always looked like an inch worm more than a cricket. LOL! Maybe a small grasshopper since he's green. :)

I know that this sounds funny but it really works....
 
Feed them Grits!
Yes .... Grits.....
 
What happens is the ants eat the grits and also bring them back to the nest for others to feed on including the queen.....
 
Now we all know what happens to grits when you add water? Right?
Well, the ants eat, become fat and engorged and finally blow up......yep that's right blow up from the expansion of the Grits!!!
 
And it is environmentally friendly as well!
 
Clifford

Truckermusic
Feed them Grits!

Um, I'm a west coast guy...  What the heck are grits anyway?

You and everyone else Herb. I've owned an exterminating company since 1989 and yeah, ants are bad all of a sudden. I have learned one thing in 49 odd years experience... once you think that you know what any insect will do in a given situation, they will do something different. Hint, later in the summer and in the fall they are suckers for carbs, ie: sugar based baits. You don't want to use any bait that has too much active, you want a slow kill so they wont associate death with the bait. Maxforce or Combat (same product, different name) is good for when they want protein and they can change in a second. Sugar or protein are the two bases for any ant baits and sometimes it is best to put out several baits. I have had ant problems in homes where I had to put out some of every bait I could get in order to gain control.
 
Some ants can only b econtrolled with baits. You need to ID the ant. If you spray Pharoah ants they will go away for a few weeks and come back two to three times as bad. They are a tiny, amber colored ant. They will bud their clolny into several colonies if you spray them. Fire ants, find and treat the nest/mound. Get the cheapest liquid pesticide you can get, mix it weak and pour 1.5 to 2 gallons into each nest, all at once... or they will just move. If you bait fire ants never put the bait on the mound but scatter it around the mound.
Sometimes alternating sweet bait and protein bait around the house and then spraying Termidor/fipronil arund the perimeter will do the trick. Termidor is vert slow acting and the ants transfer it to each other wiping out the colony before they realize there is a problem.
 
Still, the best treatment is to find and kill the nest but don't hold back Fire ant nests can be three ft deep. Carpenter ants can have a main nest with 7 or more satellite nests but the main nest will have larvae, they only have one queen. Some ants have multiple queens. Carpenter ants also forage up to 100 yds from their nest.
 
So good luck. If you can't get contro try to figure out what kind of ant you have and maybe I can help. There are some pretty easy ways to tell under a little magnification... and it matters.
 
Julien

Danny Danzi
Herb, it's the same here. I can't even begin to tell you how much I hate bugs. Well, actually, yes I can and I think I will just so you see you're not alone. LOL!!
 
Every year for the 4th of July, NJ gets hit by flying ants. You can't even find out where they come in. It makes my skin crawl. They don't bite, but they annoy you because they fly to the top of your light fixtures and just keep on hitting them making this popping sound. They get in everywhere. Through my window seals, my AC outlets, my ceiling....man, I can't tell you what it does to me. Imagine having a client and the next thing you know, you have 10 flying ants popping all over the ceiling.
 
This year I went out to look at the back of the studio where they seem to be entering. I nearly threw up when I went out there. I have bars on all my lower level windows. When I went out there....the bars were moving. Ever see pictures of a man covered in bees to where it looks like he has a beard? That's what my bars looked like.
 
After insane spraying, I called a friend of mine and had him dig up my ground as far as he could to check my foundation. I had him seal everything he could find...redid concrete, caulked anywhere and everywhere and after I saw all the work he did, I felt good about it.
 
I wasn't done there. Next I called an exterminator friend of mine. I told him what the problem was and he said "dude, you just ain't gonna beat them....it's too hot and it will be a fight to where they win." So I did some investigating...and then called him again.
 
This time, I had him drill into my walls and blow this white powder in the walls. We have "entry" points to each wall that are hidden so that they don't stick out to people. Every 6 months, he comes and shoots this powder in the walls and I've not seen anything since.
 
In my house, I went to take a shower about 2 weeks ago and saw 2 ants in my tub. I went ballistic and though "great, now I need to dig up my house foundation and shoot the powder in the walls here too like I did the studio".
 
So I call my friend the exterminator and have him come over. I was dumb-founded because my house is huge man...and my bathroom is on the second floor. Like WAY UP high in the house. How on earth are ants getting there?! As slow as they walk, it would take 2 months for them to climb that high! Low and behold, the lil baystids were getting in through the pipes!!! We powdered all through the pipes, in through the sheetrock and in any nook and cranny we could find.
 
Next, I set these borax bait stations that literally let the ants take the food back to the colony, they share it and it wipes them out. I put so many of them around my house and my studio, you would think I have a serious problem with an invasion. LOL!
 
I still wasn't done. I figured since I got my friend here, I HATE HATE HATE crickets!! Now we got those camel crickets here too and man, they sooo suck! Really hard to kill as they can move side to side and disappear like a ninja. The regular crickets bother me so bad with that chirp stuff, I cannot finish my work if I hear one. I have to stop doing what I'm doing and search him out. They get in my drop ceiling, hide all over the place and are excellent ventriloquists! So my exterminator friend gets his truck and covers my grass with a blanket of this stuff for bugs, crickets, ticks, fleas, you name it, we're covered.
 
Then he comes in and sprinkles this yellow granular stuff all over, inside my drop ceiling, the garage, behind furniture etc. If I get stuff after this....I'm moving some place cold. Between the bugs and leaving my AC on all the time....I don't know what's worse, bugs and their treatments, or a $600 electric bill due to the AC for home and studio. I used to love summer.....now I can't wait for frost! Death to all bugs! :)
 
-Danny

Danny,
I got a cricket call once that turned out to be a smoke detector going bad... really.
 
Fleas are the worst. They will stay in their pupal case until you step on them. Then they will kick it open and jump. They can stay in there for months... then once the hatch they can go like a year without eating... they are amazing... and getting harder to control because the EPA is taking away everything that works to control them and pet owners are using stuff like Frontline+ and Advantage but not putting it on the pet every month per the label... so, some fleas survive and of course the ones who survive develope a resistance to the active ingredient and pass it on to the next generation... in lots of places Frontline+ is just no longer working. It can become a MESS in a hurry. IF you don't have a pet NEVER allow anyone to visit and bring their dog or cat, I don't care how much they swear their pet has no fleas... you have a really good chance of getting an infestation a week or 10 days after they leave and it is YOU who will have the problem, not them. With dogs and cats, as long as everything remains status quo.. all is well but go on vacation, board your pet and when you get home BAM... fleas all over you as son as you walk in the house.
Fleas are BAD NEWS.
 
Smoke detectors... well, they aren't much rouble, lol.
 
J

craigb
But my smoke detector has fleas...

Scratch it's neck...
J

Anyone like a few Cicadas to add to the mix..I have a few here I'd really love to get rid of

jbow
Danny,
I got a cricket call once that turned out to be a smoke detector going bad... really.
 
Fleas are the worst. They will stay in their pupal case until you step on them. Then they will kick it open and jump. They can stay in there for months... then once the hatch they can go like a year without eating... they are amazing... and getting harder to control because the EPA is taking away everything that works to control them and pet owners are using stuff like Frontline+ and Advantage but not putting it on the pet every month per the label... so, some fleas survive and of course the ones who survive develope a resistance to the active ingredient and pass it on to the next generation... in lots of places Frontline+ is just no longer working. It can become a MESS in a hurry. IF you don't have a pet NEVER allow anyone to visit and bring their dog or cat, I don't care how much they swear their pet has no fleas... you have a really good chance of getting an infestation a week or 10 days after they leave and it is YOU who will have the problem, not them. With dogs and cats, as long as everything remains status quo.. all is well but go on vacation, board your pet and when you get home BAM... fleas all over you as son as you walk in the house.
Fleas are BAD NEWS.
 
Smoke detectors... well, they aren't much rouble, lol.
 
J

That's priceless! Hahaha! What's funny, I have one of those smoke detectors! It's one of the early ones. It works great too! If I put my oven on self cleaning mode, it will trip it off in 30 seconds. The funny thing....when the battery starts to wear, it chirps like a large cricket just as you mentioned. My house is full of antiques man. Rotary dial phones, push button phones, old smoke detectors, vintage furniture etc. My mom and dad always loved that stuff so when I bought the house, I sort of kept it. I just recently had the rotary phones disconnected. My dad still walks up to them and starts to dial, then remembers when I start laughin' at him which is followed by a "go eff yaself Dan"! (he always says the letter, never the word lol)
 
But anyway, a few years ago he says "Dan, I think we got a super cricket down in the basement. I never heard one this loud. He doesn't chirp much, but when he does...man, it's really loud." I ask him where abouts he heard it...he says near the refrigerator in the basment, so I start my quest there. Now if you've ever hunted crickets before, you know they are really smart and are the best ventriloqusits in the business. The best way to find them, is to get down to their level on your knees and listen close. If you stand while hunting, you'll think you hear them in places where they really aren't. It's quite amazing. The next time you hunt for one and do it standing up, try gettin down low....it will bring you right to him! Anyway...
 
I'm crawling across the floor trying to listen for this super cricket. While doing so, I hear a cricket but he's not where dad said he was. I stand up and walk to where I hear him...sounds like he's in the drop ceiling...no wait, I drop down to the floor....I got him. This thing was loud....like really loud. I pick up a box, and there he was. What's weird...he was a baby. Definitely the loudest one I ever found for his size. Ok, this can't be the one dad meant...
 
So back to the refrigerator cricket. I get my flashlight and start looking behind the frige....underneath, then I hear the sound of super cricket himself and man was he loud!! But it was a familiar sound and didn't seem natural because it was super loud, a bit robotic and it echo'd. Then it hit me....smoke detector in the stairwell! I went and pressed the test button and sure enough, that was super cricket. My dad cracked up when I told him what it was. :) I replaced the battery and super cricket was put to rest. LOL!
 
-Danny

I try to remember to replace the crickets in my smoke detectors every six months.  Sometimes it takes a little effort to plug them in.