By Geoffrey McGinness
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April 14, 2021
With spring-time comes warm weather, sunny days, a bit of rain and the bloom of plants everywhere. It also brings lots of different types of pests. During spring, ants will start to forage in force and colonies will quickly grow in population. They also will migrate, looking for a place out of the rain, protected from predators but close to food sources. If a colony is already quite large, they will start to swarm, where hundred (or even thousands) of pairs of winged ants will leave the colony and set off to find a place to start a new colony. Often, finding mulch beds, crawlspaces, or roots of trees to start a colony. Places commonly around most homes and businesses, allowing them a short path to foraging inside your house. A great way to prevent this is to be proactive and have the exterior of your home treated against intruders with a product they will track back into the colony and help reduce their numbers or wipe out the colony. Many baits do not work unless placed at a certain distance to the colony. To close and the colony may realize it is dangerous before having its full effect and be able to migrate their colony, so far and the ants gathering it will start to become ill and be rejected by the colony, thus the bait never making it into the colony. A slow residual is usually best unless you can find the colony and treat it directly. Another pest that is prevalent and hated by most people: wasps. This time of year many are just starting to forage for the materials needed to start their nests. Now is a good time to do something against them. Within a month of two, a small nest the size of an acorn can grow to the size of a football with hundreds of wasps and eggs inside. Removing a nest that size can be laborious and dangerous. I also suggest at that point, hiring a professional so you do not risk getting stung a bunch of times. Other common spring pests: spiders, beatles, gnats and early garden harvesting insects. Most of these are just mildly annoying and all but the spiders generally prefer to be outside. But they do wander in from time to time. With pest control treatments, you can make sure they don't annoy you.