Get Rid of the Pesky Bugs this Summer with these Tricks

Your Garden Is Attracting Mosquitoes

First off, you should know that hedges, bushes, and tall grass in your garden are the perfect homes for mosquitoes. This notion is because, during the day, they like to get out of the sun and hide in a place that provides ample cover for them. 

Make sure you are keeping your hedges and bushes pruned, and mow your lawn once a week. Minimizing the shady options for mosquitoes is your first call, and it will make your garden look great as well, so it’s a win-win situation. 

Mosquitoes Love Water Sources

Did you know that mosquitoes are attracted to water? Moreover, they don’t even need much water to breed very successfully and leave you with even more annoying buzzing at night and bites on your body. So eliminate as much standing water in your yard as possible.

Encourage your neighbors to do the same if everyone in the area is battling with a mosquito issue. If they find refuge in your neighbor’s yard, then they will be back to visit you in your home at some point despite your gardening efforts. 

Get Rid Of All Unnecessary Water Outside

Mosquitoes need just a fraction of water to lay their eggs, and this means anything in your home or garden that has water could be the breeding ground for these annoying pests. So you’ll need to search and find these water sources that are attracting them. 

Make sure you drain all water from old buckets, kid pools, or even flower pots that are left sitting outside. Another tip is to make sure your gutters are cleaned out so that the water can flow freely through them and doesn’t get stuck. 

Maintaining Your Water Features

If you have beautiful water features in your garden, it doesn’t mean you need to drain them or fill them up. Instead, buy some goldfish or minnows and add them to your pond or water garden. Even if their lives are short, they’ll gobble up the mosquito larvae in there. 

If you are lucky enough to have a swimming pool in your backyard or a hot tub, make sure to keep them covered when you aren’t using them. Also, make sure that you are chlorinating these pests as this action prevents the eggs from surviving.

Empty Out Birdbaths Regularly

This cleaning hack includes birdbaths and wading pools. Instead of adding chlorine to these, make sure to change out the water regularly, at least once a week, to get rid of any mosquito that is lingering behind. You also need to scrub the birdbath or pool before refilling it. 

If none of the above has worked for you, it’s time to bring in the big guns. It means calling in an exterminator who can spray your foliage for you. It will wipe out mosquitoes and leave you in peace. You will need to get this done about once a month to see the results.

Prepping For A Mosquito-Free Party

If you are having a party and you want to make sure that your guests aren’t being eaten alive by mosquitoes, bring out your fans. The reason mosquitoes are attracted to us is because of body odors and carbon dioxide emitted while breathing. 

By dissipating this, it makes us harder to find. Make sure you set up fans at ground level to help break up the scent pattern. It’s an easy solution if you don’t have time to get an exterminator before you host a fantastic event that you don’t want mosquitoes to disrupt. 

Ways To Avoid Being Bitten

There are other ways for you to avoid getting bitten by a mosquito, however. The great idea is to replace all your bulbs outside with yellow “bug” bulbs. Mosquitoes are attracted to light, and this product will attract a lot less than the regular lights you have outdoors. 

You can also put on insect repellent if you are planning on staying outside during the evening or if the mosquitoes are finding their way into your home when you are asleep. There is also an insect repellent that you can spray onto your clothes instead of your skin. 

Use Skin And Cloth Repellent

By putting both an insect repellent on your skin and your clothes, mosquitoes will keep their distance. Be very careful when using these products, and make sure you don’t get the one meant for your clothing on your skin. 

Some mosquito myths need to be busted, in any case. You know all those citronella candles you stocked up on for the summer? They aren’t that effective at keeping mosquitoes away. The candle smoke might have a small effect. 

Will Misting Systems Do The Job?

If you have outdoor foggers and misting systems, these also won’t keep them away for long. You may have a reprieve from this irritating insect, but once you turn off the systems, the mosquitoes will be back in full force. 

You may have heard of spraying garlic into your yard; this won’t work either. There have also been studies done on the ultrasonic devices that say they deter insects like mosquitoes, but apparently, they do not affect at all, so don’t waste your money. 

A Bat Tower In Your Garden

You might also think you have been brilliant by installing a bat tower in your garden in the hopes of having the bats come and eat the mosquitoes. But bats very rarely feed on mosquitoes so this won’t be the solution to your problem. 

There are very effective ways to keep the mosquitoes at bay, but what other insects are waiting for you back at home that you need to get rid of? Next up are flies. There are so many different species of flies, but they are all incredibly annoying and need to go. 

Get Rid Of Flies Quickly

Flies buzz around all day and are quite gross to look at in general. Apart from this, they also carry diseases and can pose a severe health hazard to you and your home if you let them become full-time residents there. 

If you have noticed that they are becoming more and more frequent to visit your home, it’s time to get rid of them as soon as you can. Apart from flies, fleas are another pest that is the absolute worst to hang around at your house. 

How To Handle A Flea Infestation

Fleas may have hitched a ride on your pet into your home, but that doesn’t mean they’ll only be living on your pet. They can find their way all-around your home and make living there a real nightmare. Don’t let the fleas bug you or your pets. 

You need to kill the fleas as soon as you can if they are now in your home. What is the best way to do this? It’s with a home-safe flea spray. Start with spraying the places where you can see the fleas. You’ll need to go on a proper hunt. 

Clean Your Carpets Thoroughly

Fleas and other annoying pests’ favorite places are on the edges of your rugs, pet bedding, and the backs of couches. Cleaning your carpets is the first step of the process, and this will remove a lot of the fleas that are currently active. 

But there will still be others. There could be dormant fleas and eggs that they may have laid. You need to remove these as well; otherwise, you’ll be left in a never-ending cycle of insects invading your home and your pet’s fur. 

Vacuum Every Inch Of Your Home

What you have to do next is get your cleaning gloves on. The experts say that when you have fleas in your home, you need to clean everything that is made of fabric or has a fabric. Start with vacuuming all your furniture, carpets, curtains, and pillows. 

You need to make very sure that you have vacuumed your carpets very carefully, as this is one of the main places that fleas like to be. Next on your list will be the bed linen. You need to take off every piece of bed linen and wash them. 

Throw Everything Into The Washing Machine

Not only do you need to wash your bedding, but all other laundry and towels too. You also need to clean the bedding of your pet very thoroughly. While you are doing this, keep an eye out for any other fleas, and if you see them, spray the area with flea spray. 

If the infestation of fleas is terrible, you should just throw away your pet’s bedding and get new bedding instead. You should not risk getting the fleas back once you’ve gone through all this effort to get rid of them the first time around. 

Ask Your Vet About Flea Prevention

Once this is all done, you should have a clean and flea-free home once more. To avoid this happening again in the future, make sure that you are taking care of your pets, as they are one of the leading causes of fleas in a house. 

Ask your vet about options for preventing fleas. There are many great options in the forms of collars, pills, or drops. It’s better to prevent them from coming into your home in the first place than having to sort them out once they’re inside. 

We Don’t Like Beetlejuice

You might not be struggling with fleas or mosquitoes in your home, but what about beetles? If you have giant beetles like stag beetles, you could be in trouble. It is because they can hurt you if they are feeling scared. 

They have large mouth parts, which is their defense mechanism. If you do get in the way of one of these beetles, you will have a pinprick-like injury. If the area is bruised, put some ice on it and bandage it for protection. 

The Bugs In Your Kitchen

These next bugs are one that you will find in your kitchen, unfortunately. They’re meal moths, also known as pantry moths. They love to find their way into your flour, dried fruit, and sometimes the beans in your cupboard too. 

They might even eat through pet food and shockingly, your Christmas ornaments. The good thing about these moths, though, is that they aren’t disease carriers. So, while they may be annoying pests, they won’t cause you harm. 

Keep Your Food Fresh And Bug-Free

If you find them in your flour packets or pet food, you will just need to take out the bodies and then freeze the food for a minimum of four days. You can then use the food as usual and make sure you keep an eye out for meal moths, fruit flies, and gnats in the future. 

Instead of keeping food in packets, get sealable containers or jugs to protect them adequately from meal moths if your kitchen is prone to getting them. These containers will not only protect your food from bugs, but it will stay a lot fresher too. 

Preparing Your Home For Ticks

You should prepare yourself for bugs at certain times of the year, and one of the most important to watch out for is ticks. These can be dangerous to not only you and your family but your pets as well. Ticks carry diseases, which is why it’s essential to keep them out of your home. 

Tick explosions generally take place in summer. Summer and spring are prime time for ticks, and you should take precautions to protect your home from them. What do you need to do to keep them away? 

Where Are Ticks Commonly Found?

Ticks are found in wooded areas that have high levels of humidity. They do also much prefer cooler places, which is why you should keep your lawns manicured. They don’t like to be out in the sun, so if you look after your garden, you won’t find them crawling through your grass. 

A great tip to avoid having ticks in your lawn in summer is to add an edge around your garden. It can be made using gravel, decking, stone, tile, or any other hardscape to prevent them from making your garden their home. 

Deer Ticks Come With Deer

Deer ticks travel around on deer. As much as you love seeing deer in the area, they could be the cause of ticks. The solution is to fence off your property, so they don’t bring them inside. 

This method is a great way to minimize the number of ticks that you find in the area. Another essential thing to consider is that you should not plant items that attract deer. Deer are plant-eaters and will come to your yard to feast. 

Changing The Plants In Your Garden

Limiting their food options in your garden will deter them from entering and bringing in unwanted ticks. If you are a plant lover, plant things with a strong scent as deer don’t like them.

That could include sage, lavender, peonies, and also ornamental salvias. Lastly, you can resort to chemicals. It should keep the ticks away from your property — purchase acaricide to kill ticks. 

Applying Tick Pesticides

You can then apply this pesticide to your lawns and also the woodland edges. You will, however, need to get a professional in to do the job because it requires specific spray equipment to get the job done correctly and adequately. 

There are natural options if you don’t want to use a professional with pesticides. Natural tick repellents include cedar oil spray and apple cider vinegar. These are good options to try out before you need to hire a service to use pesticides. 

The Dreaded Bed Bugs

Another worrisome bug that you find in your home is the dreaded bed bug. You need first to see what the pest looks like and also where they tend to hide. To identify a bed bug, you will notice that they are flat and small with oval-shaped bodies. They are also brown. 

These horrible bugs hide in mattresses, your bedding, furniture, carpets, and also in your baseboards. If you already have a bed bug infestation, there are ways to get rid of them and to prevent more in the future. 

Bed Bugs Don’t Spread Diseases

The only good thing about bed bugs is that they don’t spread disease. The bad news is that they leave you with nasty bites and are a real problem to get rid of. Once you’ve identified that you have bed bugs, you also need to look out for eggs. 

Their eggs appear to be the size of a small white rice grain. The eggs are just waiting to hatch, so you need to act quickly before they do and spread even more. Bed bugs tend to bite bare skin that they find when they are on your mattress. 

You’ll Start To Notice Bites

If you have bed bugs, you might notice that you have bites on areas that were touching the mattress or your pillow. These bites range between an itchy mosquito bite or large and puffy bite marks, depending on how your skin reacts to it. 

If you’ve noticed yourself scratching, it’s time to check for bed bugs. How do you do this? The good thing is that bed bugs won’t be found in your hair, but they do like to stay close to their food source. 

Make Sure To Inspect Your Mattress

Inspect your mattress. Look into all the cracks of your bed. This bugs favorite hang out is the piping around your mattress. If you can’t see the bugs, you can also look for dark droppings on the bed, blood, and their eggs or gold-colored shells. 

You should perform a check every time you change your sheets so that if you do notice these signs, you can act quickly to resolve the issue. Now, if you’ve spotted them, it’s time to get rid of them. The first thing is to stop feeding them.

Isolate Your Mattress

This action means that you need to separate your mattress from other items in the room. You can do this by moving the bed away from the wall and also moving furniture that is close to it. Take off the skirting that hangs down to the floor and any blankets that hang onto the floor. 

Place all the legs of the bed onto insect interceptors. When the bugs are in there, they will not be able to climb out because of the plastic coating with talcum powder on it. That will stop them from getting back onto your bed again. 

Vacuum And Chemically Treat Your Mattress

The next thing is to vacuum and chemically-treat your mattress and box spring. Once you have done that, place them in encasement bags. Unfortunately, if the bed bugs are inside the mattress, your chemical spray would not have killed them. 

The purpose of an encasement bag is that it can trap bed bugs, and they are not able to escape. You will need to keep the bag on for about a year because of the lifespan of a bed bug. They can live more than ten months after they’ve had a meal. 

You Might Need A New Mattress

If you can’t handle sleeping on the encasement bag, you might just have to buy a new mattress. Before you get rid of the bug-infested one, make sure it is properly wrapped up before moving it through your home to prevent them from getting out onto other beds. 

If, however, your chemicals did the job, you now need to treat the room as well. You will need to vacuum every single thing in sight. It includes furniture, baseboards, the bed frame, and everything in between. Make sure you get into all the corners as well around the room. 

How To Clean Your Vacuum

Make sure to throw away the vacuum bag afterward. If your vacuum doesn’t have a bag, empty the contents into a bag and tie it up before you toss it. Make sure to treat the inside of the vacuum with a spray insecticide as well. 

You will also need to gather all your clothing, bedding, and towels. Keep them bagged tightly until you get to the washing machine. Make sure your washing setting is hot and make sure they dry correctly after the wash. The wash should be over 120 degrees Fahrenheit. 

Read All Instructions Carefully

It is costly to hire someone to get rid of bed bugs, and it might take a few treatments before they are gone. A DIY bed bug extermination can be just as effective if you follow the correct protocol. 

Make sure you read all instructions carefully, especially when working with chemicals. There are plenty of bed bug sprays on the market that you can spray onto the areas where you think bed bugs would hide in your home. 

Bed Bug Store-Bought Sprays

These sprays will only kill the bugs and eggs that they touch, so you don’t need to spray it onto the walls or ceilings. You can also get bed bug traps. While these won’t stop an infestation, they will let you know if you have one. 

Set up the traps in areas like a baseboard trim or even under a bedside table. They will need to travel up to get to your bed, so you’ll see if there are any. When you can see you have them, you can get to work quickly. 

Prepare Yourself For Bugs

Bugs in your home may seem like the most irritating disaster, but they can be dealt with relatively efficiently. They can also be prevented, so you don’t even have to have them in your home in the first place.

Specific bugs can cause more of a problem than others, which is why it is essential to educate yourself on the types of pests in your area and also which bugs come with the different seasons. Be prepared, and don’t be scared. 

Sources:

Family Handyman – The 16 Most Disgusting House Bugs and How To Get Rid of Them

Family Handyman – 7 Tips on How to Repel Mosquitoes

Family Handyman – How to Get Rid of Fleas

Family Handyman – What to Do When You Find a Tick in Your House

Family Handyman – How to Get Rid of Bed Bugs: A DIY Guide