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Hello, this is Ben with Ben’s pest control. And it’s time for another one of our Ben’s pest control podcasts. And today I want to discuss trees and discuss what’s them in. I don’t know if it’ll be mostly general terms as far as how trees affect our pest control. And, and I’m going to give you a couple of what I consider to be interesting examples. And let me start with one right now, I’ve got a call last week for a lady who’s got a Airbnb. And she said, we are getting Palmetto bugs. And we don’t know what’s going on, but they don’t seem to be getting any better. And the Palmetto bugs just seem to keep coming back. And we’ve had our companies spray, and we just aren’t really sure what’s going on. And we can’t have the Palmetto bugs with this being an Airbnb. So I went out to take a look at the house. And the first thing that definitely crossed my mind was the house is a house that has a crawlspace. So there’s a area underneath the house that is dark, and it’s accessible. And it’s possible in my mind that the roaches could be coming through the crawlspace to get in the house. But crawlspaces are for a different episode. Today we want to discuss trees. When I when I went to the house, I go around the back and the house had this very, very large shade tree in the back and it was beautiful. And there were some sea grapes. Anyways, the trees had lost a lot of leaves, there were just a lot of leaves on the ground. And though where I grew up, in Wisconsin, fall, everybody goes through fall, the trees lose their leaves, people are used to raking them up. For as long as I’ve lived in Florida, not a lot of people really rake up leaves. But in this case, there were so many dead leaves on the ground, it was probably two to three inches thick of dead leaves. And those dead leaves are decaying vegetation. Now, it’s kind of in the early stages. But what happens is, the older leaves are covered by newer leaves that have fallen off the tree and those older leaves underneath us they get wet, and they’re sitting in the dark, they start to break down and it creates almost like a fertilizer or food for the trees and the plants. And that’s what we call the king vegetation. And that decaying vegetation is a very ample sued food source. Sorry, that decaying vegetation is a very ample food source. For things like roaches, they would be very, very pleased with that. And that would give them something that they could easily munch on and enjoy and, and thrive off of. So in this case, the whole back of the house where the crawlspace opening is, you’ve got just stacks and stacks of leaves, that the roaches are enjoying living around. And I believe that that is definitely contributing a great deal to the roach problem that this house is experiencing. Now, the leaves are just one thing. And in Florida leaves are not a common thing that most people deal with, they don’t really care. But this house needs to care, they need to get those leaves pushed away. But that’s not the only thing that we deal with trees. Sometimes you have branches that fall and had a lot of our trees, especially some of our older oak trees. They have dead branches on them. I do believe in some cases, maybe the trees were struck by lightning. Maybe people did bad trimming jobs, but you’ll have a dead branch. And as that branch gets worse, it’ll fall off the tree. And so you don’t really want to leave those dead branches laying against house because just like the leaves, a dead branch is decaying vegetation. So it’s, it’s, it just can’t be allowed for the most part, if possible to sit near the house or close to the house and go through the decomposition process that a branch would go through. You want to get that away from your house, you want to move that food source away. And you don’t want to leave it there where you can get the bugs that are associated with having that branch or go through the decomp process.
The breaking down process. And so that’s the second thing we see with trees. Now let’s go a little bit different here. We also have a lot of fruit trees in Florida. We have orange Trees, we have lemon trees, we have grapefruit. And that’s just some we get palm trees that have coconuts. We have a lot of trees mangoes, trying to think that I apologize, I don’t recall with papaya grows on a tree, but we get a lot of, Oh, I know what I was thinking avocado trees, avocados grow on trees and the avocado trees I believe are the ones that get large. And so all this fruit is sitting on those trees. And I can’t tell you how many times in the pest control industry, we’ll go to a house and there’ll be having a problem. And they’ll have all this fruit that dropped. And it’ll be everywhere. And so that fruit is literally food. Maybe it’s not decaying vegetation. But as it does start to break down. In essence, it is decaying vegetation. But it’s food that humans like in a lot of cases. But things like even rats will love that they may not eat the decaying leaves. But you can draw things like rats and other things to your house to come and eat the fruit that is now sitting on the ground and just sitting there spoiling. And I can’t tell you how many times we’ve had houses with rats that, especially if the people have a lot of citrus trees, you know darn well that it’s kind of going hand in hand that there’s food there for these things to eat. And then they’re going to the house to live where they’re protected as far as their home goes. So the fruit also provides a food source for for things like rats, ants, roaches, millipedes, anything that that says, hey, this is this is food, it’s free, it’s sitting here. Let’s help ourselves to this. This is this is great. And so trees also provide food in that regard, especially if they’re fruit trees. Another thing we see with trees a lot is trees, a touch houses, that works like a bridge for creatures to get on your house. And that’s another thing if possible that if you can avoid, you just don’t want it you don’t want a ton of branches hanging on your house, touching your house and giving creatures access to get into your house or onto your house and cause you to have problems. So when you have trees, you should also have the trees trimmed. So they don’t touch your structure. Because trees touching the structure, as I stated is a bridge, it’s an access. And that’s another issue that you know, it can easily be prevented by just getting the trees trimmed. So when it comes to trees, uh hopefully we gave you some information today that will make you realize that there are a lot of different things that that come into play when it comes to the trees. And you kind of got to take them all into consideration and realize what’s good, what’s what’s bad and what what hopefully you can avoid, prevent from getting some kind of infestation or problem and the house that I started this story talking about with all a leaf. We went out last week and we baited in their crawlspace for the roaches, we had seen some roaches in their crawlspace. And when I went back today to check on the house to see everything was going I opened up the crawlspace opening and right within about three feet of the opening after applying paint on Friday, there were 12 Dead roaches just right there. My assumption was they ate the bait and they had died right there. And I was able to say listen, a lot of these roaches are coming from the crawlspace. And more than likely they’re coming from the leaves that are sitting on the ground that that sticking in there. They’re going this is a great food for us. We’re going to take advantage of this. And then more than likely when it rains, they go to high ground and they get in the house and they were having a problem. So again, this is Ben with Ben’s pest control and if you’re interested in more information, you can give our office a call at 772-878-1972 or check out our website at WWW dot Bens pest up is thank you and have a great day
