Know Your Enemy
Property owners in the Fargo-Moorhead and Mayville, ND areas often have to deal with unwanted “guests.” Some will eat your food. Some will eat your house. Some will even eat you.
But no matter their habits, no pest is a match for Advantage Pest Control. Our safe yet highly effective pest control solutions will quickly remove vile animals from your home or place of business. Here are just some of the unwelcome critters we give the boot to on a daily basis. Give us a call today if you’d like us to start evicting pests!
Bees, Wasps, Hornets & Yellow Jackets
Sure, they pollinate flowers and occasionally provide us with honey, but that doesn’t give airborne hymenopterans the right to access your property. Their stingers can be deadly to people with allergies. Their appetite for sugar and food waste makes them especially problematic around kitchens and garbage bins. They can also build hives on your house – or worse yet, inside your walls!
We don’t just completely and safely remove hives that are troubling our clients. We also locate and seal off the holes that bees, wasps and similar insects can use to sneak indoors, so you can rest assured no stings are in store for you and your family.
Bed Bugs
Bed bugs are loathsome insects that make no secret of their presence. They leave rust-colored stains wherever they defecate, and deposit their husks and eggshells all over the place. They produce a distinctive sickly-sweet odor as well. Their bites, which typically appear as zigzags of small welts, can be painful and itchy. Bed bugs are also visible to the naked eye, as an adult specimen can be over 1/4″ long!
The only good bed bug is a dead bed bug. Trust our team to locate these nuisances in all the little nooks and crannies they like to take cover in and eradicate them completely. And remember: anyone can get bed bugs. They’re a great equalizer, in a sense, so there’s no shame in asking for help getting rid of them!
Spiders
Unless you live in Australia, spiders are pretty much harmless. Our team even feels some affinity toward the arachnids – like us, they get rid of unwanted pests!
Does that mean you should want spiders in your home? Unless you’re going for an Addams Family vibe, no. Spiders aren’t pleasant to be around even if you aren’t arachnophobic, which is why you should contact us the second something eight-legged starts troubling you.
Rats, Mice & Other Rodents
Rats and mice don’t just like to gnaw. They have to gnaw, or else their teeth will grow so long that they can no longer eat. Unfortunately, rodents gnaw indiscriminately, and will enthusiastically destroy your home’s drywall, siding, insulation, plumbing, and even its electrical system.
And it only gets worse. Ravenous rodents will happily treat themselves to everything in your pantry. They defecate and urinate everywhere they go, which creates ideal breeding ground for mold and spreads infectious diseases like hantavirus and salmonellosis. And if you’ve ever laid awake at night listening to rodents throwing a fiesta in your walls, then you surely hate having them around for that reason alone.
Mice, rats and other rodents don’t play fair. And neither do we. When you want scurrying squeakers gone for good, consider Advantage Pest Control your best ally.
Ants
We admire the ants’ industrious spirit. We just wish they would keep their compulsions to burrow and gather resources away from our homes and commercial properties. They aren’t just destructive. They can also spread diseases like E. coli, shigella and salmonella!
Trails of live ants aren’t the only sign that you have an ant problem. If you have noticed small sawdust trails in your home, little piles of soil in your basement floor, a hollow noise when you knock on your beams, discarded wings, or a faint rustling sound inside your walls, then you may very likely have ants. Carpenter ants are an especially destructive species for obvious reasons, but none of the world’s 12,000 ant species are welcome inside your property. Fortunately, your pals at Advantage Pest Control can identify ants just as easily as we can eliminate them.
Beetles
Some species, such as auger beetles, can do massive damage to a property’s wood frame. Other species, such as carpet beetles, can quickly destroy an entire wardrobe. Other beetles, such as weevils, aren’t really destructive at all – but that doesn’t make them any more welcome inside your home.
The great scientist J.B.S. Haldane once wrote “If one could conclude as to the nature of the Creator from a study of creation it would appear that God has an inordinate fondness for stars and beetles.” He was referring to the fact that hundreds of thousands of species of beetles have been discovered, almost 30,000 of which live in the United States alone. We aren’t familiar with every single one of those species – but if it can infest a property in North Dakota or Minnesota, we know how to make it disappear.
Lady Bugs
Lady bugs are also beetles, albeit especially frustrating ones. They aren’t harmful to your health, but their proclivity for finding warm places to hibernate in means they love infiltrating houses. Lady bugs also love laying their eggs inside houses, and can produce up to 300 of them in a single clutch. That means just a handful of lady bugs can fill your home with thousands of foul-smelling beetles that relentlessly clink their chitinous bodies against the windows.
If your home has been infested with lady bugs, don’t drive yourself bonkers trying to nip them all out of the air with a vacuum cleaner hose. The Advantage Pest Control team knows what makes lady bugs tick – and, more specifically, what makes them die. One call is all it takes to say goodnight, ladies!
Asian Beetles
Also known as ladybugs, Asian beetles live off a diet of aphids, mealybugs, and other insects that are harmful to crops. They may not be all bad, but you still don’t want the red-and-black bugs inside your home. Ladybugs are known to infest wood and damage fabrics. They’re also happy to eat many human foods, too.
Perhaps worst of all, Asian beetles do something called “reflexive bleeding.” When startled, the insects secrete reddish-yellow fluid from their leg joints. This substance is their blood, and it smells vile whether the ladybug releases it in response to alarm or getting crushed by a frustrated homeowner.
Cockroaches
Ask one billion people to name their favorite animal. Not a single one of them will say the cockroach. Blattodeans aren’t just unpopular because they are unhygienic scavengers that can spread diseases such as dysentery, diarrhea, cholera and typhoid. They aren’t universally despised solely because their saliva, feces and shedding body parts can trigger allergies and asthma attacks. If cockroaches were only unpleasant to look at – which they most assuredly are – then no one would want them around. And sadly, even the cleanest houses aren’t safe from cockroach infestations.
Cockroaches are infamously difficult to kill. They can run three miles per hour, reproduce asexually, sense even the faintest traces of food odors, survive off almost any source of nutrition (including toenail clippings), withstand compression up to 900 times their body weight, and develop an impressive immunity to poisons. In fact, roaches are so hardy that they can live for one week following total decapitation.
But we aren’t daunted. The Advantage Pest Control team takes pride in ridding the world of such a bothersome insect! With just a little careful planning and judicious application of a few chemicals, we can quickly eliminate a roach infestation of any size.
Fleas
Itching. Welts. Hair loss. Skin irritation. Whitish or brownish flecks on your pets’ fur or bedding. These are all signs that your home is infested with fleas. The miniscule insect doesn’t just cause intense discomfort. It can also spread plague bacteria, typhus, cat scratch disease, and even tapeworms! Don’t take any risks. Contact us today to make your residence flea-free!
Cluster Flies
This member of the Diptera order of insects is dark gray in color, about 1/3 to 2/5 inches in length, and covered in coarse, gold-colored hairs. They are larger and darker in color than house flies, but their dissimilarities don’t end there. Whereas house flies sneak into the building they’re named after so they can gorge themselves on food, cluster flies have a different objective for invading your space: warmth.
That’s right! Cluster flies infiltrate houses in the fall and winter simply because they want refuge from the cold. They don’t pilfer food, damage property or furniture, or spread any diseases that are known to harm people. But they are annoying, and they can cross-contaminate food – both sufficient reasons on their own to call a Fargo-Moorhead exterminator today.
Flies
House flies, fruit flies, blow flies, flesh flies, horse flies and other species of aptly named “filth flies” are among the most reviled animals on earth – and for good reason. They are guilty of spreading over 60 known diseases including dysentery, cholera, anthrax, tuberculosis, and even leprosy. Flies excel at spreading disease thanks to their strong appetite for garbage, manure and dead animals, as well as their tendency to defecate wherever they land.
But even if flies weren’t a health hazard, you still wouldn’t want them anywhere near your house. The buzzing nuisances seem to delight in darting right past your nose, and one sight of their writing maggots is enough to turn anyone’s stomach!
Other Pests
Has your home been invaded by any other animal that’s capable of invading a home? Never fear! No vertebrate or invertebrate is a match for Advantage Pest Control’s all-encompassing pest removal services. Just give us a call today when you want the nuisance to go away!