Ruud Kleinpaste: Dealing with those pesky summer pests

From Saturday Morning with Jack Tame · 3:40

Show by Newstalk ZB

On these lovely warm spring days it pays to get up earlier, just to take a look and see who’s roaming your house when you least expect it. In the pantry: Indian Meal Moths, Flour Moths. Tobacco beetles, drugstore beetles – this is a group of insects that smell the food we store in our pantry and somehow manage to enter the plastic bags and other containers. They're tricky to control, as insecticidal sprays are not terribly clever to use inside a pantry with food items. Getting rid of affected food by freezing it overnight before putting it in the rubbish bin is a clever trick. Un-opened food items can be taken out of the pantry to create a completely empty space; a spray with neem oil (and left to dry) will keep the pests away from that area. Woolen carpets defaced by “carpet beetles” and “carpet moths” are quite easy to spot, yet tricky to control. Try some permethrin insecticide (available from Safeworx). Spray the carpet and let it dry. The residue will last for months. This is also the moment for Daddy Longlegs Spiders as well as White-tailed Spiders. They both have their stories of myths. The Daddy Longlegs is not a biter-of-humans! (It can’t even go through a human skin) And when it comes to the activities of White-Tails, we have very little true evidence of them biting humans. Jumping Spiders are often considered – well, spiders! For some reason we often give them a bad rap, which is totally ridiculous. They are brilliant makers of delicate silk: bungy-jumping downwards in search of a yummy fly that will not need flyspray in the house! Some of these spiders can “dance” to find a partner; others use creative sign language to communicate with a possible partner. Itchy skin can be caused by Bird Lice that escape from a bird nest under your roof! That’s how life operates, when the young birds leave the nest and fly all over the neighbourhood. Those bird lice literally need some food in the form of blood, especially since their real hosts have moved on! Tricky to control by the way! Oh, yes… Homo Sapiens is the only species (as far as I can see), that hosts three kinds of parasitic lice (plus mites in the follicles of your eyelashes!). And you thought you owned the house on your own? LISTEN ABOVE See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

More episodes of Saturday Morning with Jack Tame

More episodes

PodSearch is a free, independent podcast search engine. Read about PodSearch, the privacy policy or contact us.