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Good afternoon. And thank you for joining us for another episode of Ben’s Pest Control podcast. My name is Ben Sell and I’m the owner of Ben’s Pest Control right here on the Treasure Coast Florida. And today, we want to talk to you about snowbirds, and pest control. Now, most people are probably wondering why we would discuss snowbirds and pest control. I mean, what’s the difference between regular people and pest control and snowbirds and pest control? Well, actually, there is quite a bit of difference, because in a lot of cases, snowbirds aren’t here for sometimes six months out of the year. So there’s a lot of issues that can arise from having a house sit empty for that long period of time. So one of the things I want to do is just kind of discuss a few things that that we see and make some recommendations. One of the things that I want to talk about is, when the house sits empty, it’s very important that snowbirds have somebody that checks the house that they trust that goes in and does a thorough investigation. And hopefully, they can go back to them and point out any issues they see in the house that that could be leading to a bigger problem. And I want to give you my first example, one of the things we see sometimes and snowbirds, they they go away and they look at their pantry or their kitchen and they go through their food items. And they, they’re they’re very good at throwing out certain things. But other things they they kind of neglect or think oh, it’s not a problem. It’ll be fine to like come back next year. And we have things called pantry pests. Things like confused flour beetles, rice, weevils, grain beetles. And these pests are pests of food, especially food that sits for a long period of time. So give you an example of my own situation. My wife and I had bought some dog treats for our dogs. And over time that that box had sat there. And even though we gave our dog treats every day, it was a rather large box of treats. And one day we noticed these beetles and I’m sitting there going, Okay, we have some food item that that has beetles in, and we’ve got to find it, and we’ve got to get rid of it. So as we are going through everything, we stumbled upon the box of dog treats. And sure enough, the dog treat box was like something out of a horror movie just crawling with Beatles, The Beatles were just loaded in the dog treats. So we had to take the box, we had to throw it out, get rid of it get new dog treats. And this is kind of what snowbirds see if they leave the house sit for a period of time. And it can be anything from the dog treats that I mentioned to rice, pasta, anything with grains in it. One of my customers had a package of biscuit mix. And the biscuit mix was infested with beetles flower can be infested with beetles. And all of these things as they sit there and they go through the time, the beetles can lay more eggs and they can expand. So it’s very important that a the snowbirds go through their food and get rid of anything that they’re not going to consume or eat or don’t need over the summer, especially if it’s not in a can or jar. And B has somebody that’s checking the house. So the problem doesn’t just get worse and worse and worse as those beetles continue to multiply in the food items.
Another situation we’ve seen with snow birds is we’ve seen situations where the snowbirds obviously, I think it makes sense most of them don’t want to leave their water on. And the logic is you don’t want to have a leak. You don’t want to have your hot water heater or say your waterline to refrigerator break. And all sudden you end up with this huge flood in your house and have 10s of 1000s of dollars where the damage so a lot of them turn their water off, which is great. But you really need somebody that comes in, turns the water back on flushes your toilets, and and runs water down your drains. And the reason for that is your drains and your toilets, you’ve got lines that connect to the sewer. And those lines in most cases have p traps. And those p traps are designed to have water in it to prevent creatures from being able to come up and come out in your house. So when you’re going for six months or more, and those p traps don’t have any new water introduced, you actually create a situation where those p traps can dry out. And when those p traps dry out now there’s nothing preventing the creatures that live in the sewer from coming into your house. And one example I had a customer who they came back and when they came home, they went into their bathroom and they raise up their toilet seat and their toilet seat that you’d actually sit on was all just chewed up. And believe it or not, based on what we saw, they had a rat that came up through their sewage line. And my guess is it was stuck in the toilet, it couldn’t get out and it was trying to grab onto the toilet seat with its teeth. And every time it would jump up, it would grab on and it just couldn’t find a way out as my guest. We never found any signs of it in the house. But the toilet seat was pretty messed up. And they did end up having to throw out the toilet sitting in a new one. But we would hope that if there had been water run that would have happened. Another situation that occurs when the drains dry up is roaches. We have had at least I want to say three or four customers who have come back to houses full of roaches. And the roaches are what a lot of people don’t hear referred to as the Palmetto bug variety. But they’re the roaches that that are in the drains and then they come out and they’ve invaded their house. And they have found feces all over the inside of their house and have had to clean out all sorts of your cabinets, dressers, nightstands, because they found feces on their wall and feces on their beds and feces everywhere. Because the roaches just had nothing to prevent them from coming up through the sewage line and getting into the house. So it is very important that you want to prevent that situation. Now one of the things we we also say is we get customers who, when they come back in October, they want to hire us for the season, which is perfectly fine. I mean, that’s there right there, the customer. But what you find is the season when they’re here is actually less of our pest season, our pest season is pretty much April through October is our go time. Now it does get warmer earlier sometimes and it does stay lit warm later into December. But when it is warm, here we are full blow on for bugs. And ironically, that’s the time when most people are gone. So it’s a hard time to tell people yeah, you should be or you’re okay to ignore those seasons. Because while you’re gone and you’re not there, and you don’t have to see him, there’s nothing there to protect your house from the potential invasion of those pests. So, I usually tell most of the clients, it’s still good to have the house treated, even though you’re gone. You want to have some kind of application done to make it so the house is hopefully as protected as possible. So we hope, you know this helps all of our clients and help some of the other snowbirds know, you know what they’re looking at when it comes to pest control in Florida, especially over the summer when they’re gone. If there’s anything you can do, or if you have any questions, or if there’s anything we can do for you, please feel free to give us a call at 772-878-1972 or check out our website at www dot Benz pest dot biz for a free estimate a free evaluation. And we’ll be happy to pre even perform our free 57 point inspection on your house so we can tell you what we see and find and what our potential issues could be for you. All right, thank you and have a great day.
