October 1, 2020
In another blog post, we discussed what many typical insects do to handle or avoid the ravages of winter. For the vast majority of insects, winter is a trying and dangerous time of year – a particularly deep freeze may reach them even deep in soil or under debris, a late spring may cause their […]
September 15, 2020
With winter approaching, you may wonder if or how pests survive the months of brutal cold and food shortage ahead. Insects and rodents have a variety of strategies for coping with the seasons, but because they have fundamentally different physiology, those strategies are quite different. Collectively, rodents have two options for surviving the winter; hibernate […]
August 31, 2020
Spiders are a common concern for our clients… but should they be? Spiders are a diverse group, having roughly 48,000 species distributed around the globe (excluding Antarctica). Defining features of the group include eight legs, subchelate (fanged) mouthparts that are usually venomous, a narrow connection between the body sections, silk glands on the abdomen, and […]
August 15, 2020
Springtails have been very abundant this year, with a multitude of calls coming in on springtail infestations. So what are these bizarre little arthropods, what do they do, and what can we do to manage them? First off, let’s highlight the unusual classification of the springtails. Despite having six legs and an exoskeleton, they are […]
August 1, 2020
To finish off my series on names, I wanted to point out that part of the reason scientists often use scientific names rather than common names is that there are simply too many species to give each of them a scientific name and one or more common names. Especially among the species that are too […]
July 15, 2020
In our last post about insect names we discussed some of the pros and cons of common and scientific names. In this post, I want to walk through a case study that will illustrate in more detail how common name conventions work and why it can be important to get names right. As promised earlier, […]
Find basic information, prevention tips, and do-it-yourself solutions for common pests.
