With this year’s record-breaking summer temperatures in much of the United States, the danger of heat-related road safety issues is magnified. One of the most common and most dangerous is the heat-related tire blowout. Mixing 100 degree temperatures with rubber tires and freeway speeds can add up to true danger on the roads. Here’s how to avoid tire blowout disaster—and what to do if the worst happens. Heat affects tires from multiple angles. Driving in the summer results in friction between your tires and the hot asphalt. The faster the speed, the more friction builds up and the more the temperature of the air filling your tire rises. Combine this with the fact that heat and friction cau

They’re an age-old story , but cockroaches recently made the headlines when affordable senior housing in the Sacramento area was found to be infested with pests , including cockroaches. According to UC Integrated Pest Management there are six species of cockroaches in California that can become pests. The German cockroach (though found in America, including California) is the one that most prefers indoor environments kept at an ideal 70-75 degrees, like most of our homes. A single female German cockroach can lay around 30 eggs every few weeks, causing a spread of approximately 30,000 individuals in one year, making your home into something out of a horror movie! Although cockroaches are

Yellowjackets already were making headlines a month ago, even as we head into peak season for stinging insects in our Sacramento pest control region. The San Francisco Chronicle and other NorCal newspapers reported a July 3 yellowjacket attack on more than 70 attendees of the Alameda County Fair. Apparently, the ground-dwelling yellowjackets were disturbed by a fireworks display in the fairgrounds arena. None of the victims, who ranged in age from a 6-month-old infant to a person over age 60, exhibited allergic reactions or required hospitalization, although some received multiple stings. In the Seattle area, also over the July 4th weekend, at least five people were treated for anaphylac

Spiders, long a favored subject of sci-fi movies and horror novels, seem to provoke an especially strong yuck factor in humans. Although we know on an intellectual level that they have many beneficial purposes in the eco-system, including eating other insect pests, most of us don’t want them in our kids’ bedrooms. Now that warm weather has arrived, spiders are proliferating outdoors and often making their way into our homes. Of the more than 50,000 species of spiders, only a relatively few of them are able to bite humans, for the simple reason that most have mouth parts too small to break human skin. Only one type of California spider, the Black Widow, is considered to be a serious medic

Most of the spiders we find here in our Sacramento pest control region are not capable of severely injuring we humans. But our area does host one of the most dangerous spiders in North America, the black widow, or Latrodectus hesperus. With the rain gone and warm summer weather finally here, many of us will be tackling neglected yards and gardens. Take care where you stick your hands. Black widow spiders are most commonly found outdoors, in nooks and corners of your yard that haven’t been disturbed for a while. Black widow spiders often build their webs in wood or rock piles, culverts, meter boxes, crawl spaces and sheds, but may move into basements or garages where undisturbed clutter gi

Bed bugs (Cimex lectularius) are once again a problem in the United States, around the world—and even in Sacramento—a problem that doesn’t seem to be going away any time soon. Bed bugs were seemingly eradicated in the United States and much of the rest of the world back in the 1940s, largely due to the widespread use of the pesticide DDT. Use of DDT was banned in the United States in 1971, and later in the rest of the world, due to environmental and health concerns. The resurgence of bedbugs has been attributed in part to the ban on DDT, to increased global travel, and to the possibility that the insects have developed resistance to pesticides. Increased use of baits to control insect inf

When it comes to termites, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Termites are just as damaging as they ever were, and in some parts of the country (including the San Diego area), new species, such as the Formosan termite, have arrived from other parts of the world to voraciously attack homes and properties. A few years back, when the real estate market was booming, a lot of homeowners and business owners in our Sacramento pest control region didn't worry much about termites; they figured by the time any damage was done, they'd have traded up to a newer or larger home or commercial property. These days the real estate market is a lot slower, and many of us are stepping back and

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.

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