Think again. Bed bugs are no laughing matter… even though they played a role in NBC’s hit show “30 Rock” in November when Alec Baldwin’s character Jack had a bed bug infestation of his own. He was humorously ostracized at work, forced to take the subway instead of the company car and heckled by his coworkers for having “a bad case of the chew-daddies.”

While watching the Nightly News on NBC last night, another story ran on these little creatures. (Click here to view.) Turns out that the population of bed bugs has risen 500% in recent years and that one out of four hotel rooms has had an infestation.

From the National Pest Management Association’s site pestworld.org, below are some FAQ’s on bed bugs:

Why are bed bugs so hard to treat?
Bed bugs should not be equated with filth or sanitation problems – in hotels or in homes. Bed bugs are very elusive, transient and nocturnal pests. They can live for a year or more without eating and can withstand a wide range of temperatures. Bed bugs can be controlled with vigilance, constant inspection and treatment by a professional.

Why are bed bugs an issue for hotels, visitors and homeowners?
Bed bugs leave itchy, bloody welts on human skin. Once inside a hotel or home, bed bugs spread rapidly from room to room – through pipes, in vacuum cleaners, on clothing and luggage. In a hotel, bed bugs can even spread to neighboring rooms.

Are bed bugs just in beds?
Bed bugs are not just in beds. They can be in chair cushions, sofas, behind electrical outlets, cracks and crevices around baseboards, or even behind picture frames. In other words, they can live pretty much anywhere.

What can you do to protect yourself from bed bug infestations?
When staying at a hotel, inspect the mattress, bedding, headboard and nightstands thoroughly. And when returning from a trip, check your luggage and clothing.

My coworkers and I were swapping stories yesterday about kids and bugs and I was reminded of how fascinating these little creatures can be – not only to adults, but especially to children. Unlocking the door to a miniature universe of wonder can be as simple as just poking around under a rock or in the grass.

You and your little explorer can try these fun ideas, courtesy of Scholastic:

1. Plant a butterfly garden. In a sunny spot out of the wind, plant blooming varieties like geraniums and hydrangeas, plus plants that provide food for larvae such as Mexican milkweed. Find out what else the butterflies in your area need at butterflywebsite.com.
2. Listen! Catch a non-stinging insect that makes noise in a paper cup. Crickets and flies are good candidates. Cover the cup with waxed paper and hold it on with a rubber band. Now place your ear against the paper and listen.
3. Do the worker-bee waggle! Honeybees “dance” to communicate the location and distance of a nectar stash to the other bees. Talk with your kids about this fascinating communication, and then make up your own version.
4. Take an umbrella out on a sunny day. Place it open upside down under a leafy, low-hanging branch. Shake the branch like you mean it — then identify what lands in your umbrella with an insect book or online.

Tools for the Trade
These items will make your child feel like a real scientist:

• Butterfly net
• Tweezers (only for dead specimens)
• Observation jar (punch holes in the lid of a clean jar)
• Magnifying glass
• Notebook for recording thoughts and sketches
• Bug and spider identification book like Simon & Schuster Children’s Guide to Insects and Spiders (Simon & Schuster, $23; ages 9 to 12) or Don’t Squash That Bug: The Curious Kid’s Guide to Insects (Lobster Press, ages 4 to 8, $15)
• Click here to visit Massey’s bug database 

Massey provides pest prevention services for residential and commercial properties, but not all insects are harmful! Have fun exploring!

Bob Belmont, Massey’s Training & Technical Director and a Board Certified Entomologist, recently walked the grounds of the Central Florida Zoo with Sandi Linn, the Zoo’s Director of Education, scoping out the best spot to place a special insect trap. In partnership with the Zoo, Massey will soon begin an insect biodiversity study that will hopefully lead to a complete biodiversity study of the entire zoo grounds.

Massey’s eco-friendly insect trap (similar to the one on the right that Bob has behind his own moth lab in Sanford, Fla.) will randomly attract night-flying insects to a walk-in screened cage. The special trap allows for the collection of a few bugs and the release of other insects during the day. Massey will be teaching interested Zoo employees how to run the trap, collect the samples, and then preserve and label the specimens to be of scientific value. Various other trapping methods will also be utilized throughout the year.

The Zoo will learn a great deal from this study about their local insect fauna and will begin to better understand insects, their food plants and adult flight periods. The published data will also likely spur similar studies and attract local and out-of-state scientists to the location.

Thanks Bob! We look forward to hearing more about this study as it progresses.

Remember in our Meet The Team: Bob Belmont post, we talked about Bob’s hobby of studying and collecting geometrid moths? For those of you that didn’t know, for the past 41 years, Bob has built a private collection of geometrid moths as a hobby.

Part of Bob's Collection of Geometrid Moths

Over time the collection has exceeded the space limits of his custom built lab at his home.  It also became too valuable to keep at home due to the rarity of many of the moths. So in December 2009, Bob donated his ENTIRE moth collection to the Florida Museum of Natural History’s McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity in Gainesville, FL. Their Lepidoptera collection is the second largest in the world and will soon be the largest! The McGuire collection is kept in a very protected and climate-controlled environment utilizing the most modern methods of collection maintenance.

These two geometrids are new to science! They remain undescribed.

According to Dr. Tom Emmel, Director of the Center, Bob’s “…donation of 13,909 pinned and labeled geometrid moths was a valuable…and important contribution to our collection.” Bob said he plans to continue his hobby of studying moths and insects in his home lab and years from now, when he decides to retire, he hopes to continue studying geometridae at the McGuire Center.

In a series of “Meet the Team” blog postings, we’ll introduce you to the professional and technical team behind the blogs here at Massey Services.

Bob Belmont – Bug Guy

Bob is a Pest Prevention Training & Technical Director for Massey Services. One of his many jobs at Massey is to provide identification of insects and arthropods for our customers when our team is unsure of the true identity of a pest.

Why would the experts at Massey ever be unsure? Well, very often customers will scotch tape samples of insect specimens to paper that end up squished or crushed. Imagine trying to identify a hundred tiny flattened bugs that are already the size of a pinhead. Well, that’s exactly the sort of thing that Bob enjoys!

Bob is an entomologist who received his B.S. degree in entomology from the University of California, Davis, and his Master’s Degree in Entomology from the University of Florida in Gainesville. He is also Board Certified through the Entomological Society of America, among holding many other professional appointments.

As part of his work at Massey, he trains technicians, provides quality assurance inspections at our Service Centers in Florida, Georgia and Louisiana, sets company treatment protocols, researches new pest management methods and troubleshoots some of the worst pest problems that the company encounters.

His personal hobby has been collecting and studying geometrid moths of America north of Mexico. He has an enormous collection and has made contributions to major national collections. He even discovered a new species of moth.

Bob has also created his own insect office at home, converting an expanded double car garage to a climate-controlled laboratory, chock with a lab floor, TAP insulation that is termite proof, insect proof and even fire proof. The lab also includes 50 feet of counter top, a double sink, a special closet with insect collection devices, a shadowless photography station and he even tests new products to understand their properties and activities before introducing them to Massey for field testing.

So you can see, when Bob talks or writes about insects, we tend to listen – since he really knows what he’s talking about! In fact, Bob was featured recently on the cover of October 2009 Florida’s Pest Pro magazine!

Back to school shopping, well beware of…ants? That’s right, ants are a small but very annoying potential issue one of our customers just reported. When she parked under a seemingly perfect spot – shady, under a nice oak tree – and went into the mall for an afternoon of back-to-school-tax-free shopping, she brought home more than just bargains. She found herself with an unending stream of ants in her car. We see this more often than you’d think: parking in a spot like this, you can easily intercept a trail of ants that crawl up your tires and into your car.

Once these ants – small, clear colored ants called “Ghost Ants” – enter your car, they make a nest in those little crevices around your car that can accumulate leaves (you know the ones, near the windshield wipers, around the seal of your trunk or hood, in the door hinges, etc).

Once they’ve settled in they are hard to get rid of! Our customer had been battling tiny ghost ants in her car for over a month. She tried many solutions: over-the-counter ant sprays, liquid ant bait, and wet wipes because she was constantly using them to kill ants by hand. She vacuumed, used anti bacterial spray and even went so far as to have her mechanic spray RAID underneath the vehicle – all to no avail.

Simply put, the colony hadn’t been eliminated. Most pest prevention solutions solve cosmetic problems – they treat what you can see quickly. But, they aren’t capable of colony elimination. The most effective way to get rid of the infestation is to use a professional grade ant bait. As ghost ants roam around a car, they collect the bait and take it back to the queen at the nest, wiping out the whole colony.

It takes about a week and while the car is being treated, we advised our customer to avoid parking in areas with trees and leaf litter during the week (ant bait actually attracts ants, so if you were to park on top of another trail, you can actually attract more ants to the bait!). Sure enough, about five days later, we got the phone call: the car was ant-free!

Although we typically treat homes and businesses, ants can get pretty much anywhere. If you have questions about ghost ants, don’t hesitate to call us.

Many pest service providers only service the interior and immediate exterior of their commercial properties.

To have a truly integrated pest program, a service should focus on identifying conditions, avenues and sources of pest activity. Many times these sources  can often be found away from the structure along property lines, plant bed areas, parking lot islands, trash collection areas and other property features. Inspecting these areas and putting into place corrective and preventive actions is critical to keep pests from getting in and coming back.

When selecting a pest service provider, be certain to look for one who takes these steps to assure the program is truly preventing pests and not reacting to them after they enter the structure.

To find out more about Massey’s PrevenTech Commercial Pest Prevention Program or to get a Free Pest Inspection, call us at 1-888-2MASSEY (262-7739).

Tips to prevent pests

Massey’s Pest Prevention Service is a customized service that identifies and eliminates the conditions, avenues, and sources of pest infestation in and around your home.

On the very first treatment, instead of blindly providing treatment to your entire home, Massey performs your first service in a very targeted way.

• We thoroughly inspect inside and out for pest colonies, avenues they may take and conditions that caused the colonies in the first place.
• We protect interior wall voids with a long-lasting dust
• We seal gaps that the pests use to gain access into your home and directly treat any individual nests that we uncover.
• We brush away and remove spiders and webs, wasp and dirt dauber nests from around windows and eaves.
• We prune away vegetation touching the home that serves as an avenue for ants and other crawling pests.
• We inspect and attempt to clean out some gutter debris and try and free up the main gutter drains.
• We dump standing water in cans, pots and kids toys to prevent mosquito buildup.
• We inspect and spot treat within a 50-foot radius surrounding the home or to the property line if it is less than 50 feet from the home.
• We even rotate the materials we use each month to prevent pest resistance. Our graduate entomologists and technical experts determine the best materials for use seasonally in your region and select the most effective baits for specific pests to keep them from bothering you.
• Most importantly Massey will make written recommendations to help even further in preventing your pests: We may recommend replacement of damaged door seals that allow roaches to enter or we may recommend pruning larger tree limbs off of the home or moving woodpiles from the foundation to the far edge of the property.
• Following the initial quarterly treatment we follow up in 7-10 days to ensure maximum pest prevention.

Massey’s goal is to provide the very best pest prevention services in our industry.
To find out more about our Pest Prevention Program, get a Free Pest Inspection or call us at 1-888-2MASSEY (262-7739).

Knowing How Fleas Get In and Stay In – Can Help You Get Them Out and Keep Them Out.

Fleas have always followed pets into homes annoying both Fido and his owner. What’s more annoying is they always seem to resurface when they’re least expected!

Prevent Fleas in Your Home

Fortunately this is not because we’re messy or don’t bathe our pets regularly. Rather, it’s a result of the flea life cycle. You see:

• Fleas lay tiny eggs about ½ the size of a pinhead.

• Eggs hatch into wiggling, hairy little larva.

• Larvae turn into miniature cocoons with pupa inside.

• Cocoons are spun right into the carpet material so that they cannot be vacuumed.

• Pupa wait until there is plenty of motion indoors to hatch.

Knowing all of this can help you control fleas inside your home. Follow these tips to evict fleas from your abode.

• Use flea products on pets without interruption so populations cannot get started.

• Vacuum any flea eggs thoroughly before larvae hatch & cocoons are spun in carpet.

• Treat for fleas and then wait. (It takes about 2 weeks for the last generation of cocoons to emerge into adult fleas because these cocoons cannot be killed or removed).

• Continue to remove fleas from pets daily until all fleas are gone.

If you think you have a flea problem, or want to learn more about Massey’s Pest Prevention, schedule a free inspection or call us at 1-888-2MASSEY (262-7739).

Think Fire Ants are only an Outside Nuisance? Think Again!

Fire Ants on your grass, sidewalks, parking lots or anywhere on your property pose a real threat to your business. That’s because these are areas where patrons and their children traverse, making them ready targets for fire ants and their stinging bites.

Keep Fire Ants off Your Property

Even worse, fire ants that set up homes in these places can easily enter your establishment through tiny cracks and gaps in your foundation or under door plates. From here they gain access behind baseboards and walls, eventually locating food items inside.

Stings from fire ants usually develop into a tight pustule that itches and burns. Sometimes, the sting site can become infected. And, persons allergic to bee and wasp stings are especially susceptible because they can experience anaphylactic shock from these tiny creatures.

With 2.5 million tons of living fire ants in the Southeast – your property and your customers can easily become a target.

What to do if you suspect you may have fire ants on your property?

• Do not disturb any Fire Ant nests. Any disturbance may encourage the colony to move somewhere else and this can make eradication more difficult.

• Make sure that materials infested with fire ants are not wheeled across your landscape, spreading an infestation.

• Seal cracks and crevices where ants may come inside.

• Employ a professional pest service that can eliminate ants and their nests and prevent future colonies from forming.

If you think you have an ant problem, or want to learn about Massey’s Commercial Pest Prevention, schedule a Free Inspection, or call us at 1-888-2MASSEY (262-7739).