Warm weather and abundance of nasties keep pest controllers busy
A long hot summer is good for bugs and other bugbears, as well as for holidays.
Gary Clark's phone has been ringing off the hook and his two full-time staff are flat out dealing with flies, fleas and white-tailed spiders. Mr Clark is a registered pest management technician, and has been controlling Wanganui pests since 1987.
He said hot, dry weather provided ideal breeding conditions for some of them.
House flies and lesser house flies are the creatures annoying most of his customers. They are the sticky little flies that like to land on your leg, or circle the middle of a room. To breed they need moisture and food for their maggots, and temperatures of 26C or higher are ideal.
Most people use low toxicity, off-the-shelf products to deal with them, but Mr Clark said pest management technicians with stronger products got better results.
Where there flies there are lots of spiders to catch them. Where there are a lot of spiders there will be white tail spiders to prey on them. Mr Clark is getting calls about them too. White tail spiders sometimes bite humans, and the result can be a painful swelling.
Fleas also favour hot weather, and where there are a few adult fleas there will be 20 times more in the pupae state, waiting to hatch.
Mr Clark gets called to Housing New Zealand houses where contractors walk in to do repairs and leave again in a hurry.
"The vibration alerts the fleas inside the pupae, and they all hatch at once. There can be two thousand at once, and the people hop out in a hurry. We get that quite a lot."
Cheap flea treatments don't work well, Mr Clark said. He recommends more expensive ones with insect growth regulators.
Hot dry weather is also an ideal time for ants to breed.
"The Whanganui Police Station is chocker with them. I'm going to be doing something about that in the next couple days."
He hasn't found many Argentinian ants in Wanganui, but said they were a big problem in Nelson.
"They take over from other ants, and you can get four million ants per colony."
This isn't a big year for cluster flies, which feed on earthworms that live in silt loam soil. The flies all hatch at once in ideal conditions, and congregate in their thousands.
Mr Clark once treated a huge woolshed for them. Then every horizontal surface was covered with dead flies. The farmer got barrels full when he swept them up.
Wanganui East and Springvale houses are especially likely to have Gisborne cockroaches, which like to live in cracks and crannies and come indoors in winter. They sometimes arrive in junk mail, because it is distributed from a property with a lot of the cockroaches nearby.
People don't like Gisborne cockroaches because they look scary - but they don't spread disease like American cockroaches.
Also on the undesirable list are bedbugs, blood-sucking parasites that move to new places on people, in clothing and in luggage. Mr Clark has been to places in Wanganui with them, but he wouldn't say where.
Bedbugs are better killed by heat than by insecticides.