Nothing in Florida beats the summertime. It can come with a small, complex price. The summer weather in Florida offers creepy crawlers an ideal paradise, as the warm temperatures and humidity tend to increase insects’ activity. Common summer pests such as ants, termites, and spiders that flock to the Sunshine State can wreck your backyard barbecues and outdoor gatherings.
The issue arises in South Florida when it comes to pests. There are many unique insects and pests that plague businesses and homes in South Florida due to the humid tropical air. There are numerous unique pests that you may not find anywhere else in America that are common here. In this article, we will discuss some of the most common Florida pests and how to get rid of them.
Mosquitoes
Mosquito bites can be agonizing, itchy, painful, and can cause disease in Florida. St. Louis encephalitis, West Nile virus encephalitis, and eastern equine encephalitis are the most impactful mosquito-borne diseases in Florida. It is important to protect yourself to avoid bites and the possibility of getting a disease from a mosquito.
The warm tropical areas are the right breeding grounds for mosquitoes throughout South Florida. Mosquitoes lay their eggs in wet, moist places, and it is perfect for them to lay their eggs in the swampy, watery areas of Florida. The Aedes Aegypt mosquito originates from Africa, is expected in the area.⠀Or diseases such as yellow fever, dengue fever, and Zika, the Aedes aegypt mosquito is a known vector.
Prevention
To prevent mosquitoes around your house or property in Florida, keep vegetation, bushes, and shrubs away from your home and get rid of any standing water around your property. For mosquitoes to breed, just a small amount of standing water is enough. It is also sufficient to use fans around outdoor sitting areas to keep mosquitoes away, as they are poor fliers.
The water holder should be changed when water is deliberately collected for use, such as in rain barrels; this should be done to prevent mosquitoes from laying eggs on or near the water. To Avoid mosquitoes from laying eggs, add screening to the top, or cover the rain barrel with a lid. You must adequately dispose of water-holding containers or drain the water from the containers for water not deliberately gathered, such as water collected in discarded cans, bottles, and buckets. Try to get rid of the old appliances sitting outdoors. To remove leaves that can block the drain, and allow water to be stored, clean out the roof gutters. Check for leaky faucets and patch them. Check for standing water, areas that can pool and linger after rainfall in your yard. Or add Bti to kill the larvae of the mosquito.
Whiteflies
Whiteflies have become a major issue affecting many homes in Florida. These flies are named for the white waxy material on their wings and bodies. Like a small moth, whiteflies can cause severe damage to plants. The most conspicuous indicator of whiteflies’ infestation is the white spirals found on the leaves’ surface. Whiteflies lay their eggs on the underside of leaves, making them almost invisible to the naked eye. When their egg is hatched, whiteflies take their nutrients with needle-like mouths from the plant’s leaves. As these Florida pests rely on plant juices, they leave the plant dry, turning them yellow and drop to death.
In defense of the fly, I would like to point out some positive qualities: many are super pollinators, help break down organic material and control other insect pests. But because flies are so abundant, and since they have so many diseases, there is no excuse not to monitor them around your family and home. Buzzing, on its own, is enough to make you crazy.
Prevention
The good news is that flies in your home are pretty easy to control. It’s called exclusion, and it’s efficient for all types of flies. Don’t serve them anything they want (rotting or fresh meat, ripe or rotting goods, sugary food and drinks, standing water) or allow them easy access through open doors and windows and screen holes. Make sure there’s no standing water in the yard. Keep swimming pools, ponds, and fountains clean and airy. If you’ve got a birdbath, change the water and clean the basin regularly. Clean up after your pet every time, too. Yes, the flies are eating that too!
Crickets
The chances say that if you have ever come across a cricket indoors, it was probably a house cricket. They can be found in your home’s kitchens, fireplaces, behind numerous appliances and furniture, and other holes. They are nocturnal throughout the night, being vocal and active.
House crickets, like field crickets, are driven by cold temperatures indoors. All stages are capable of living year-round in buildings. By night, adults are drawn to lights. House crickets are usually found within buildings in humid, dark locations. Things such as cotton, linen, wool, silk, and fur can be affected, especially when they are soiled by transpiration or food.
Prevention
Some of the most effective and efficient techniques to get rid of crickets can be found below.
Sticky traps: sticky tape can trap some of the crickets that have invaded the house.
Insecticides: At any local hardware or grocery store, insecticides are available. This is not a good idea if the home has little kids or pets.
Dehumidifier: Purchasing a dehumidifier would make the site a less likely place to want to live for the cricket.
The use of natural solutions to deal with cricket will help keep the cost of infestation down. It can prove to be beneficial to use cedar near the entry site because it is a natural fungicide and insecticide.
The ability to fend off crickets is also present in these natural techniques. Tea tree oil appears to work better with crickets than it does with bed bugs. A successful alternative can also be peppermint and cedar oils.
Spiders:
All spiders have some form of venom to paralyze and eat their prey with, but not all venom is useful to humans clinically. Spiders with venom are capable of causing fatal infection and even death. Spiders love to linger in places where they can spin their webs without any disturbance. There are five poisonous spider species in Florida: the brown spider recluse and four widow spider species.
The black widow spider
This spider doesn’t need any introduction. You might also be aware that the red hourglass mark on the bottom of its abdomen will easily distinguish this jet black, hairless spider; what you may not know, though, is that there are two kinds of black windows in this state: the southern black widow and the northern black widow. While there is a visual distinction between these two spiders, such as the presence of red dots on the top of the abdomen and a split on the bottom of the abdomen in the center of the hourglass point.
All widow spiders are lethal to humans, but since the antivenom discovery, the risk of dying from a widow spider bite has decreased significantly. However, being bitten by one is always incredibly painful, and these bites come with many uncomfortable physical symptoms, such as sweating, muscle cramps, chills, fever, nausea, and vomiting. Luckily, the black widow is a skittish creature that, when confronted, would run. Typically, bites occur only when people approach or come close to where a black widow hides, such as placing a foot in a boot, putting on a shirt, or flipping over a rock.
Prevention
Black Widow Spiders are often attracted by favorable conditions and hiding places surrounding a house’s exterior or other structure. Recommended are the following sanitation practices:
1. Piles of logs, firewood, bricks, boards, or other debris should be moved, stored off the ground, and covered with plastic, as far from the home or structure as possible.
2. Tall vegetation should be cut away from the base, such as ivy.
3. grass should be cut short regularly.
4.store objects off the floor and away from the wall.
When they are spotted during an inspection, collect existing black widow spiders, webs, and egg sacs with a vacuum. The vacuum bag should be changed immediately after finishing and sealed in a plastic bag before discarding it in an outdoor garbage receptacle.
Exclusion & Lighting: To avoid entry, any holes or openings in the exterior or surrounding window and door frames of the building should be covered with Caulk or fine wire mesh. Doors should be installed with weather strips, and tight-fitted screens should be used in all vents. Use Bulbs that attract fewer flying insects should be used for outdoor lighting, reducing the food available to spiders.
Ants from Florida
If you live in Florida, you know that inside our homes, ants are frequent guests. It is not uncommon to find a trail of these little six-legged creatures even in the cleanest house, making their way along the floor, across a countertop, or up a wall. Ants are much more prevalent outside. Without jumping over an ant mound, you can not take more than a few steps in most yards. There are a considerable number of species of ants that call Florida their home. State residents, however, are lucky that most of them do not bother homeowners or owners of businesses. Therefore, we would only concentrate on ants that are the most likely to become pests or bite and sting.
Florida is home to nearly 20 ants of various kinds. Here is a couple that you are likely to come across.
Carpenter Ants from Florida
Up to 11 mm (about .5) “long, Florida carpenter ants are fairly large by ant standards. Their orange and black bodies make it very simple to classify them. In decayed wood, trees, and shrubs, Florida carpenter ants are just as happy constructing nests outdoors as they are in attics, walls, floors, and other secluded areas indoors. They mainly feed at night for food and eat insect honeydew, plant juices, insects, or any sweets they might find. When threatened, they are understood to bite and can even spray formic acid.
Red Imported Fire Ants
Red imported fire ants are more aggressive than other ants species, and if you accidentally step too close to their mounds, they will gladly bite you. By chewing, they catch hold of their prey (or even the ankles) and then sting to inject toxin using their abdominals. For several days, the site of the bite might be sore and scratching. There can be even larger threats for hypersensitive people. Whereas red imported fire ants feed mainly on young plants, small animals can be attacked and killed. With copper-colored heads, these ants have blackish to reddish bodies. Red imported fire ants prefer nesting under logs or rocks, but they also make dome-shaped mounds in fields or yards.
Bigheaded ants
Do you see mounds of sand around the edges of your driveway or between the sidewalk cracks? Those could be big-headed ants. These ants love to cover their foraging tracks with dirt and debris. The dirt piles formed by the bigheaded Ant can be a nuisance inside the house. As their name suggests, some of these ants have big heads in contrast to other colony members. While the representatives with the smaller heads are called minor workers, they are referred to as major workers or soldiers. Bigheaded ants feed on candy, other insects, and soil invertebrates and are omnivorous.
Rover Ants
One of the smallest pest ants you can find is Rover ants. They only grow up to a length of 1.5-2 mm (1/16-1/12) and are dark brown or black. They typically nest in mulch or under debris lying on the ground and feed on the honeydew produced by sap-sucking insects. In the house, these ants are drawn to areas such as bathrooms or kitchens because of moisture.
General Prevention Practices
- Caulk and seal crack to remove passages to the home. You may not be able to close all the entry points as ants are incredibly adventurous at finding entry points.
2. Wipe the entry points of your home with a detergent to clear the pheromone chemical trail.
3. If you want to bait, set the bait in ant activity areas or trails so that the ants can locate the bait and take it back to their colony. Do not use the residual insecticide in the same places as the baits. When baits are set, the worker ants find it and take it back to the nest and feed it to the queen and larval ants. This control method is incompatible with repulsive spray treatments that prevent workers from returning to the nest with the bait.
Use both a sweet bait and a fat / protein-based bait mix to ensure that the option of bait covers the full range of Ant’s dietary needs.
It can take a couple of weeks for baiting to get to work. When the ants consume their bait, swap it with more bait. You know, when you see the bait vanish, it is working, so just be careful!
Cockroaches
Owing to their connection with human waste and disease and their ability to spread from sewers into homes and commercial buildings, Cockroaches have become a Florida public health issue. In dark and cool environments, cockroaches can be found in a dark and cool environment. An adult cockroach can live for up to a full year. Although these little creatures can be commonly seen outdoors, they prefer to wander indoors searching for food and water. In Florida, populated areas with trees, woodpiles, and garbage facilities all provide these peridomestic cockroaches with an ample food supply.
Scientists have found that roaches are becoming more resistant to the chemical pesticides that people often use to get rid of them. This means that there is a chance that they can come back, with a vengeance, if you try just to use chemical methods. You can combine natural methods with chemical methods or just use natural ways to get rid of them. This would be slow but ultimately worth it as it would discourage future roach infestations.
Prevention
1)Clean everything, always.
This is fairly obvious. Just taking fifteen or so minutes to wipe your kitchen countertop and cleaning your dishes regularly can be the difference between a roach-infested home and one that is free of them. Since roaches are attracted to the food in the kitchen, if there isn’t any for them to find on the shelves, countertops, or sink, then they won’t be as likely to come. You’ll reduce their food supply.
2) Seal up cracks and crevices.
This is very important, especially considering the small size of German roaches. They can slip through practically any crack! So to prevent any more of them from coming into your place, just seal up all the cracks you can find using some caulk.
3) DIY cockroach bait
This is a DIY recipe that can help first to lure the cockroaches out and then kill them. Simply mix boric acid and sugar in a ratio of 3 to 1, respectively, and then sprinkle it around the entrances of these roaches’ hiding spots. While boric aid is not lethal to humans or pets, it can be a bit irritating, so it’s better to keep it away from children. Once the roaches have come out and died over some time or overnight, you can get rid of their bodies by sweeping them into the trash bin.
4) Fix Water leaks
This is very important as it can help cut off the cockroaches’ supply of water. They can survive a long time without food, but not so much without water. So make sure to fix any leaky faucets quickly!
5) Spray roaches with soapy water
This will coat them in such a way that they will suffocate and die. This happens because roaches, like many other insects, breath through their skin.
6) Essential Oils
A combination of some essential oils to turn into a spray can make a good repellent for German roaches. Some scents that they hate and that you can thus use are tea tree oil, lavender oil, peppermint oil, eucalyptus oil. You can take a spray bottle and fill it with one part vinegar, four parts water, and 10-12 drops of tea tree oil and spray it on the areas you often see these pests scurrying about. It will help in deterring them while giving your home a pleasant smell.
Drywood Termites
Another prevalent summer pest in Florida is Drywood termites. Those annoying critters love to set up colonies above ground level in wood. All of your residential and commercial fences, doors, window frames, and furniture are at risk of infestation by dry-wood termite. The presence of fecal pellets is one of the main methods of detecting a dry wood termite infestation.
Drywood termites get the moisture they need from the humidity in the air and their moisture from eating the wood. As a result, dry wood termites can live without living in the soil and do not build their nests in the soil, but instead build their nests in the dry wood they infest above ground. Through exposed wood or infested objects like wooden furniture, the pests invade homes.
Prevention
Drywood termites can be avoided by ensuring that at least 20 feet from home is stored firewood and scrap wood. Another treatment technique for a dry wood termite is to cover any gaps and crevices across the home’s base. The property should also be periodically inspected by homeowners for signs of dry wood termites, paying particular attention to the window and door frames, paint, eaves, siding, and attics.
Remove from the perimeter of your home some timber, tree stumps, and other kinds of loose wood.
Seal as many gaps, crevices, and holes as possible in your structure as they can provide termites an entry point to reach.