Don’t Share Your Domestic Paradise With Nasty Parasites This Spring

You’ve kept your home spotless all through the winter.  Now that spring is in the air, it’s time for a little rejuvenation, and a lot more social activity. Since time immemorial, spring has been a time when we reorganize and reinvigorate the home. The tradition of spring cleaning is as psychological as it is practical. Through this ritual, we shed the vestiges of the dowdy and dreary winter and cast aside the clutter that’s spent months or even years gathering dust. It helps even as we wipe, scrub and polish every surface to make our home feel brand new. It helps us to face the coming of the summer and the months where the year really gets started with a feeling of hope, cheer and optimism. This means that we find ourselves throwing a whole lot more dinner parties, house parties, soirees and barbecues. But although we may feel more inclined to share our home with the people who bring us happiness and joy, there are some decidedly less welcome visitors who may well seek to take up residence in our home this season.

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[ctt template=”4″ link=”pR7nB” via=”yes” ]Although we may feel more inclined to share our home with the people who bring us happiness and joy, there are some nasty parasites who may well seek to take up residence in our home this season.[/ctt]

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Despite all of our efforts, and our most ardent  attempts to render every surface of the home spotless, occasionally even the most well fortified of homes can become victim of an invasion. With the warm spring weather, comes a host of unwelcome guests, that you certainly won’t be baking cookies and providing milk for. Here we’ll show you how to spot them and how to get rid of them…

Bed bugs

All most of us know about bed bugs is: that our parents hoped they wouldn’t bite us as they tucked us in for the night! Perhaps this is because they are very hard to spot unless they’ve already bitten. Bed bugs have been fairly sparse for a very long time. In the decades after World War II pesticidal chemicals like DDT and chlordane were widely used. But in recent years these were found to have potentially carcinogenic properties and they are now used far less. This has led to a surge in bed bug populations. The first thing to note is that they are not confined to beds. They can lurk in any warm, dark place in the home from beneath the sofa to between the folds of your curtains. A company like ABC Home & Commercial Bed Bug Exterminators can search your home using specially trained dogs to seek out these pesky parasites, and help you to determine the best course of action based on the extent of your infestation. But before you pick up your phone, there are a few ways in which you can check for signs of a bed bug infestation…

• Bed bugs are hard to spot but visible. They’re 1-7mm in diameter, brown and oval in shape and mostly active at night.
• Bed bug bites are itchy red circles that look like cigarette burns.
• The bites form in clusters and are usually accompanied with blisters of hives at the bite site.

Fleas

Fleas are a nuisance all year round but they are less active in the winter months. In spring they come back with a  vengeance and find all manner of ways to creep into your home. They’re extremely persistent and can live even in inhospitable environments for around a week even without a host. A well fed flea can live for up to three months. They’re often brought in by family pets but can jump from host to host with ease and are perfectly capable of living in human hair (although they prefer denser animal fur). Thus, it’s a good idea to treat your dog or cat to a flea collar and give them the once over with a topical flea treatment if you see them scratching excessively.

If your pets show signs of flea infestation: no matter how often you treat them, you may need to call the exterminators to determine the extent of the infestation in your home. You can, however, vacuum or manually remove flea pupae to potentially prevent an infestation. Here’s how to recognise flea pupae. Just remember that fleas are incredibly hardly and in many cases only a professional can completely see off an infestation.

Image by Flickr

Carpenter ants

It’s not unnatural for all sorts of ant breeds to come out and forage for new homes and food sources in the warmer months. While all ant infestations are a nuisance, most are fairly benign. Our friend the carpenter ant, however, can do severe structural damage to your home. In fact, if they’re not coming into your home from an outside nest, they may already have set up a colony within the walls of your home. They create tiny tunnels through solid wooden surfaces which could prove devastating to your home. Here are some details on how to tell a carpenter ant from other breeds. See them off by placing wood waste or firewood piles far away from the home, cleaning up any food crumbs or spillages that could attract them quickly, and making sure that your gutters are unobstructed and free flowing.

This is a contributed post.

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