Many pest control situations can be solved using methods that don’t involve pesticides. Keep your home clean to reduce food and water sources for pests. Repair ripped window and door screens and plug cracks with quality caulk.
Preventing a pest problem is easier than controlling one that has already developed. Pest control’s main goals are prevention, suppression, and eradication. Click the Visit Our Website link to learn more.
Prevention involves stopping a pest problem before it occurs. This is done by avoiding what attracts the pest, blocking its entry into the building or garden, and eliminating its breeding ground. Often, it also includes using traps and bait stations to catch and kill the pest before it has a chance to cause harm.
Preventing a pest problem can be difficult because many pests are opportunistic, meaning they will take advantage of any opportunity to invade and damage a property. This is why preventing pests is so important.
Some pests can be prevented by correctly identifying them and understanding their biology. Other pests can be controlled by monitoring a field, landscape, or building—or other site—to determine how many pests are present and what damage they have caused. Monitoring may involve catching and identifying the pests, or it might include counting eggs or examining larvae and adult stages. Monitoring can help to identify the conditions that favor pest invasion, such as elevated temperatures and humidity or a lack of available food, water, or shelter.
Taking steps to prevent a pest infestation can be as simple as placing a mesh wire screen over the chimney, caulking cracks and crevices, or removing wood piles near the house. It can also involve cleaning counters and tables regularly to eliminate crumbs or spills, and taking out the trash every day (or knowing your local waste collection day). Keeping garbage cans tightly closed is another simple way to prevent pests from getting into the home.
Other preventive measures can be reducing moisture, such as fixing leaky pipes or removing standing water, and reducing the presence of food or shelter, like putting away pet food and litter. In some cases, it might mean installing bug zappers or screens over windows and doors.
Suppression is a necessary step when prevention methods have failed or are impractical. Suppression aims to reduce the population of pests below an acceptable level. For example, if there is an overabundance of bees, suppression might mean clearing the hives or removing the queen to stop further colonization. If a poison is used to suppress a pest, it should only be applied by trained and licensed professionals. Otherwise, the use of foggers or other chemical products might result in toxic exposure to humans and pets.
Suppression
The goal of suppression is to reduce the number of pests to a level that prevents unacceptable harm. This usually involves a combination of control methods.
Biological control — the use of natural enemies, predators, parasites, or disease organisms to control pests — is one form of pest suppression. This approach is based on the idea that pests can often be controlled naturally by other organisms in their environment, such as predatory insects, birds, mammals, reptiles, nematodes, and plant pathogens. The human management role in biological control is to provide the right conditions for natural enemy species to suppress pest populations.
Cultural controls — practices that reduce pest establishment, growth, and dispersal — also are important forms of pest suppression. These include changing soil conditions (e.g., water, nutrient, and aeration), planting resistant varieties, and using mulches to conserve soil moisture. These practices help to minimize the need for chemical pesticides.
Physical control — the blocking of entry into living areas — can also be effective at controlling pests. Quality sealants can be used to seal cracks and crevices around doors, windows, drains, and pipes. Screening vents and other openings is another option. Indoors, removing food and trash on a regular basis and keeping garbage cans tightly sealed can help keep pests out.
In addition, traps and baits can be used to catch pests and remove them from the building. However, traps and baits should be located where children and pets can’t reach them. Pesticides may be necessary in some situations, but only after other options have been tried. If pesticides must be used, they should be labeled for specific uses and only applied by a trained and qualified specialist.
Pests such as cockroaches, rats, termites, bed bugs and ants can cause health problems for humans and damage homes and businesses. In addition, they are a nuisance and can trigger allergies and asthma. Preventing pest infestations is essential to a safe and healthy living or working environment. For this reason, residents and maintenance workers should play an active part in pest control by reporting building maintenance problems to their supervisors or property owners and by practicing good hygiene in and around their living or working space.
Eradication
Eradication is rarely a goal in outdoor pest situations because it’s so difficult to achieve, and is usually a secondary objective behind prevention and suppression. However, eradication may be possible in enclosed spaces such as dwellings; schools, offices, and hospitals; and food preparation, processing, and storage areas.
When eradicating pests in buildings, it’s important to identify their routes of entry and conduits for movement around the building structure. It’s also necessary to change conditions that enable the pests to survive and breed within the building. This includes maintaining temperature, humidity, and light levels that are inhospitable to the pests. It’s also a good idea to repair cracks and crevices, install sweeps and astragals to fill gaps under doors, ensure that windows close tightly, and seal wall and ceiling penetrations.
For outdoor pests, eradication is most often achieved by targeted spraying with insecticides. The use of pesticides is highly regulated, and a person should never apply pesticides without first obtaining a state permit. It is especially important to read and follow the directions on the pesticide label. It’s also a good idea for people to learn as much as they can about the chemicals they’re using, including their name, EPA registration number, and material safety data sheet.
The best way to prevent pests from entering the home is to deny them shelter, food, and water. Clean up the yard, and remove stacks of woodpiles that could provide nesting sites for termites and ants. Keep the trash bin and compost pile tightly covered, and recycle newspapers and other items that might attract rats. Clean kitchens and bathrooms frequently to eliminate food sources for cockroaches and other pests. Don’t leave dishes and cutlery out on the counter or in the sink; make sure they’re cleaned daily. Store foods in air-tight containers, and don’t let them sit out stale for long periods of time to draw flies and cockroaches.
IPM
Pests attacking crops come from many directions: rodents spoil roots in the ground, nematodes destroy leafy plants and fruits in the soil, birds defoliate or eat fruits and berries in the air, and fungi can kill plants from within. Pest control involves reducing the food, water and shelter available to pests, using biological controls to disrupt the life cycle of damaging organisms, and using the least toxic chemicals when necessary.
IPM uses the results of monitoring, identification, and action thresholds to guide decisions about when to take pest control actions. It is a more thoughtful approach than either ignoring pest problems or applying broad-spectrum, low-effective chemical sprays regardless of their risks to people and the environment.
UC IPM programs collect and analyze information about pests and their interaction with the environment, integrating this knowledge to achieve sustainable crop production that minimizes damage from pests and their predators and parasites. This type of integrated thinking is necessary to prevent a vicious cycle in which the use of one pest control method leads to the development of resistant pests and the overuse of toxic chemicals that can harm the environment and human health.
To develop an IPM plan for your garden, start by inspecting your landscape plants on a regular basis. A gardening journal, a garden checklist or a computer spreadsheet is helpful for recording inspections and notes about insect and disease activity. Sticky traps or other trapping methods help to monitor pest populations and provide useful data for determining when control is needed.
After a careful evaluation of pest infestations, including the life cycles and possible damage caused by each organism, an IPM plan may call for the release of beneficial insects to disrupt or eliminate unwanted species. This is a time-consuming process, however, and it requires that you understand the life history of the pests you are trying to eliminate so that you can release predators and parasitoids at just the right times to achieve your goals.
If your monitoring, identification and action thresholds indicate that pest control is needed, choose effective, less risky controls first, such as biological and cultural controls (like crop sanitation, planting in rows, removing weeds from the field, etc.). If these do not succeed, apply more intensive control measures, but only as a last resort.