Termite swarm season is upon us, and it won’t be long before scores of households in our Sacramento pest control region will be horrified by the sight of small, winged insects emerging from living room carpets or cracks between walls and tiled floors. A couple of years back, about this time of year, a young single mom called our Sacramento pest control office in a panic. She had just received a phone call at work from her junior-high-age daughter: on arriving home from school, the daughter had walked into the living room to find the carpeted floor swarming with tiny wiggling bugs. By the time our customer got home, her resourceful daughter had the vacuum out and was sucking the little cri

Calls have been pouring into our Sacramento pest control office, with homeowners and business owners reporting that, suddenly, rats have moved into their attics and garages. Now rat problems always grow worse during our chilly, rainy Sacramento winters, because, like us, the rats are looking for a cozy, dry place indoors where they can build nests and have babies... lots and lots of babies—three to five litters per year, and as many as eight rat pups per litter! But this year we’re seeing something a little different: The rats our expert pest control technicians are pulling out of the traps they place are huge... some of them nearly a foot-and-a-half long, measuring both body and tail.

Sacramento business owner and entrepreneur David Picton has been named to the board of directors of the Albie Carson Breast Cancer Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to breast cancer education, outreach and screening in the Greater Sacramento region. Picton, owner of Sacramento-based companies G&R Body & Paint and Earth Guard Pest Management Services, said it was a personal connection that inspired him to become involved with the foundation. “My dear friend for 10 years lost his wife to breast cancer in 2002 and established the Foundation in her memory,” Picton said. “I’m honored to have the opportunity to serve as a board member and make a contribution to this wonderful org

They may be smaller and, some say, cuter, but in terms of pest control, mice are a more prevalent, more damaging and tougher problem than their two rodent cousins, rattus rattus (roof rats) and Rattus norvegicus (Norway rats). And as our Northern California winter grows colder and wetter, mice are more likely to set up housekeeping in our cozy homes and businesses. The mice we see most often in our Sacramento pest control business are the house mouse (Mus musculus). Two other types of mouse, the deer mouse and the white-footed mouse, also may invade human dwellings but are most often found in cabins and homes in remote or rural areas. The house mouse can be easily distinguished from deer

Sometimes visitors to our Sacramento pest control company Website are surprised to find pigeons on our list of household pests. The fact is, if your home or commercial building ever becomes a popular roosting spot for these ubiquitous city- and suburban-dwellers, you have a pest problem that can encompass health hazards, safety hazards and property damage, to say nothing of an unsightly mess. What we Americans call pigeons are rock doves that were domesticated and imported to North America from England and Europe in the 1800s. Over time, many of them escaped to produce large feral populations, and today their range covers much of the continent, including the U.S., southern Canada and Mexi

You remember that old song we used to sing on school field trips or at summer camp—“The ants go marching one by one....” The chorus ends: “And they all go marching down—to the ground—to get out—of the rain—boom boom boom.” As in many fairy tales and childhood songs, there is a kernel of truth in that verse: Rainy weather does send ants scurrying, long columns of them rushing here and there, searching for any crack or crevice that will take them out of the drowning wetness, into someplace warm and dry. Our Sacramento pest control company recently got a frantic call from a woman who had put off dealing with an enormous ant infestation on a large crepe myrtle tree that hung over her drivewa

As the cool weather approaches, so does the likelihood that rodents will be seeking warm nesting sites in the attics, garages and foundations of our homes and commercial buildings. In fact, some of our customers who live near wildfire areas have experienced an unseasonably early influx of these critters, driven from woods and fields by the smoke and flames. The two most common rodent invaders are mice and rats. In our region of Central-Northern California, the two most common species of pest rats are the roof rat (Rattus rattus) and the Norway rat (Rattus norvegicus), neither of which are native to California but originated in the Far East and spread across the globe centuries ago. The r

Our pest control technicians have been getting lots of complaints about spiders lately. A couple of customers have even stopped by our office, bringing dead spiders in Ziploc bags so we could identify the intruders. In both these cases, the culprits were identified as sac spiders by staff of our Sacramento pest control company. Although the bite of the agrarian sac or yellow sac spider commonly found in our homes is not fatal to humans, this type of spider is believed to be responsible for more bites than any other spider, usually when trapped in ones clothes or bedding. The bite stings and causes a red welt and irritation similar to a mosquito bite. (If any insect bite causes a severe or