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Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Volunteer Rid A Pest Podcast with Erik Gardner. I’m his guest host, Mike Stewart. And we’re going to ask the question today, what type of pests do you typically see different times of the year in Tennessee and especially Chattanooga? Erik?
You know, that’s a great question because a lot of people believe that in the wintertime it gets cold and the insects all die and they disappear. They’re gone. And you don’t have as many the next year. Well, unfortunately, that’s just not true. The insects survived the ice age, and they found them fossilized in ice and then here they are still alive today. And they haven’t really changed that much.
Insects survive the winter, and typically in Tennessee we’ll have one day that could be 20 degrees and then three or four days later we get into the 70s. So the insects go all year round. We get calls, this is being recorded in January, we got probably 15 calls today about ants and spiders in people’s homes. Different insects pop up different times of the years.
In the fall of the year, we get a lot of calls about box elder beetles, stinkbugs and things like that, lady beetles as they’re trying to find a place to overwinter. But things like ants, spiders, centipedes, crickets, they usually enter homes in December and January as the weather’s fluctuating up and down. And then, a lot of times they’ll show themselves in April and May and they’re already in the house when they got in back in the winter. It just depends on the time of year is when these things are going to be more prevalent, but in the Southeast Tennessee area, we’ve got bugs all winter long, all year round.
Are there any type of bugs that are really a nuisance more so in the spring and in the summers when people try to do things outdoors?
Yeah, outdoors, a lot of the flying insects usually start in earnest around the middle of March to the 1st of April, it depends on the year. And they start to hatch out, mosquitoes start to breed and become more of a problem as you get into the spring. Termites are a problem all year round, however they swarm, it’s their mating season, usually from mid March into June. And so, a lot of people will see termite swarms. They’re there in their house if they have a problem feeding all year around, but that’s just when they come out or they’re more visible. But in the spring is usually when things, the mating season starts up and they start reproducing more, but they’re active all year round.
Well, as a professional, what do you recommend folks do when they know they have problems or they have problems they want to have looked into by a professional? What are your suggestions and what do you guys do at Volunteer?
Well, we’re always available if they want us to come out and do a free inspection of their home, just to check things out, to look for entry points, look for breeding sites. Most people, if they have a crawl space under their home, very rarely do they go under it. It’s low, a lot of times it’s kind of damp and moist and a lot of spiderwebs and things. And that’s precisely the reason we need to go under it, because the crawl space is the number one breeding site for insects in any home. And if you neglect to go under, inspect and treat the crawl space, that’s where most of the insects are coming from.
Well, thanks again, and we’ll be back next time with another answer to a question that people have about pests in Chattanooga. Appreciate it. Erik Gardner from Volunteer Rid A Pest.
