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Michael Stewart
Welcome, everybody to the volunteer to pest podcast. Here again, my name is Mike Stewart and with our pest expert of Chattanooga, Tennessee, and surrounding areas, Eric Gardner here is to talk about something that really aggravates me in the summertime and that is mosquitoes. You know, I don’t know how many times I’ve gone out on the back deck in the backyard, we’re grilling out, we want to eat outside, and you sit there and all sudden you feel this little pinch on your arm, and you go, oh my gosh, it’s a mosquito just smack that guy. And you’re just going, you know what, it’s just ruin the evening, these pesky mosquitoes seemed like they’re just eating me alive. And so what I want to know today as a disliking member of society of the mosquito, one of the things that I need to know to reduce the amount of mosquitoes out you know if there’s anything I can do, more importantly, what has happened in the world of pest control to control the Outside index insects and your backyards. And you know, what does volunteer rida pest do fo
r the customers of Chattanooga, that makes a difference in pest control with mosquitoes. So tell me all about the mosquito, Eric.
Erik Gardner
Okay, well the mosquito is very interesting little insect it goes through a complete metamorphosis. So when it is, you know, the egg is laid, it hatches out as a larva, which just swims around on top of the water, and usually won’t stagnant water, they don’t like moving water. So straight streams and creeks moving water, they don’t like as much they like stagnant water just sitting there. And then they go into a pupa, which floats on top of the water, they emerge as the adult mosquito and then they fly off and then they begin to feed now this process can take as few as six or seven days from a gun to adult. And when it’s at temperatures above 80 degrees, which is what we have right now. So you can go from just a few mosquitoes to a few hundred to a few 2000 mosquitoes in a very short period of time with that kind of life cycle. So what do we do about that? Well, there’s a number of things. Number one, we can treat the foliage where they like to hang out mosquitoes like to avoid sunlight. So when they during the daylight hours they get on the inner branches, the inner leaves of the foliage, the shrubs and bushes. So we have a treatment that we can apply we use a backpack mist applicator is about 120 miles an hour, so it’ll blow through the shrubbery, it’ll coat those inner branches, those inner leaves, where they like to hang out, some companies just use of spray or they spray on the outer leaves. And it just sheds the treatment. It goes on the outer layers, it never makes it to the inner leaves where it needs to be their treatments not as effective. Another thing we do we use a larva side that we put in any areas where there is stagnant water or it may be stagnant water, so if say during a rain, you have a low lying area that fills up with water, many times they lay their eggs there and they’ll just let They’re dormant until it fills up with water. We go ahead and put these little brackets and these little beads in those areas and they just lay there harmlessly until it fills with water then it the larvicide will kill them, it doesn’t harm any other insects, any other animals. It just is a bacteria that attacks the mosquito larva. We also put it in gutters and downspouts, different areas where they might you know, if the downspouts clogged. The gutters might have a half inch of water running the length of them. Well, that’s where the mosquitoes are breeding and most homeowners never think Look there. So we go from the larva all the way up to the adult and we take care of all the different life cycles of the mosquito.
Michael Stewart
So we don’t want to have stagnant water in our backyard. In other words I heard years ago, bird Bad’s can be a breeding ground. And you know anywhere where water can be stagnant. We don’t want to have that. Are there any Things that you recommend that you put on your body. My wife used to say, skin so soft would be a little bit of a repellent. Have you ever heard of any of those type of things? And what do you recommend? Yeah, there’s
Erik Gardner
a lot of different repellents you can use. But here’s the thing, you know, a lot of these things can you can have allergic reaction to them. To me, it’s better to attack it at the source of the problem, which is the mosquitoes if we can treat your lawn and eliminate the mosquitoes, you should be able to go outside and not have to use any kind of repellent because the mosquitoes are just not there. And we’ve learned mosquitoes are short distance fliers, they can travel up to three quarters of a mile to feed but they don’t do it all in one journey. They stop every 10 to 15 to 20 feet to rest. So if they’re coming over from the neighbor’s yard, they’re gonna have to stop multiple times on your treated foliage before they ever make it to you. So we can actually give you 100% control from mosquitoes even a yard just got a really bad problem we can eliminate completely And we’re so sure we can we have 100% Money Back Guarantee which nobody else in mosquito control industry has. That’s how sure we are our our treatments gonna work.
Michael Stewart
Wow. So when my neighbor’s mosquito gets on my foliage, it is the end of that mosquito. Is that what you’re saying?
Erik Gardner
That’s what we have found. You know, when we first started this, I was hoping for 80 to 90% control. But we’ve actually had 100% control over our customers just don’t see any. So we can eliminate them completely. And if you know if you do have a problem, we’ll come back for free and treat again, if you’re still not happy, we’ll give you money back.
Michael Stewart
Well, folks, you heard it there if you want to be able to enjoy your backyard during the warm seasons of summer and fall and early spring. And during the mosquito season. You call Eric Gardner at volunteer rapist all you got to do is Google volunteer read a pass and Eric will get back with you he I know he’s got so many positive reviews so many people happy with their service. Verses and you know why tolerate mosquitoes when you don’t have to? Great information. Eric, thank you for this. Be sure to subscribe to this podcast, share it with your friends. Every month we come up with helpful tips to have a pest free home in Chattanooga. And that’s what we do at volunteer repast podcast. We’ll see you next time.
