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During Spring, we see a huge increase in pest infestations. This happens every year, and it can be explained by how the weather affects the pests behavior. During the winter, most pests will burrow down into their homes and hide away, since rain prevents them from being able to forage. When the sun starts to come back out, the pests come out with it, and get back to doing what they do best, finding new food and water supplies, or places to make homes in.
The best thing you can do is work to make your home a place that bugs and other pests find unappealing, or too difficult to enter. Here are some tips on keeping your home a pest free zone, even in the spring.
Close Access Points
The first step you can take is closing the doors that pests use to get inside. I’m sure you don’t just leave your front door open 24/7, so you’ll need to do some investigative work to figure out how they’re getting in. Look around your home for gaps, holes or cracks that pests might use to make their way inside. If you hire a professional pest control company, they’ll do this for you, and usually have a pretty good idea of where to start looking since they’ve had years of experience. If you’re doing it on your own, look around and fill any holes you see with caulking. This will essentially make it difficult for the pests to enter, and they’ll move on to somewhere more convenient.
Clean Up
Cleaning for pest control purposes is mostly about changing your habits. If you know that your house is prone to pest control issues, you might need to adjust some choices that you make in order to keep the pests out. For example, isolating all food to the kitchen and dining room will help keep food that might attract pests into two smaller areas, which makes thoroughly cleaning up much easier. Also, make a habit of wiping down all surfaces after you use them. This takes less than a minute and goes a long way in keeping bugs away.
Move Things That Provide Bugs Shelter
Pests are usually after a new food source when they’re milling around your house. However, they’re also attracted to places that will provide them shelter and an undisturbed hiding spot. If you have shrubs and bushes outside your home, you probably know that these tend to have bugs in them, and frankly most people don’t really mind, since they’re outside. The one thing you’ll want to make sure of though, is that they aren’t growing too close to your home’s walls. If the branches of the bushes touch your house, you’ll want to trim them back so that pests don’t use the branches to eventually travel into your home. Another place pests like to hide is in the garage. If you have a lot of boxes in there, try to keep them up off of the floor and on a shelf. Better yet, ditch the cardboard boxes for airtight plastic containers. Bugs can’t make their way into those, and will leave your garage if they don’t find a good place to hide.
