Hallelujah! Spring is HERE!!

[poconojoe]

And I can bet that I’m about to have an explosion of fleas....

Oh no!
Tell me how you fight those buggers.

We had a family member, her boyfriend and 3 cats live in our finished basement for 3 years. They were broke and had no place to live.

When they finally left, the basement was infested with fleas. I've been fighting those fleas for two years!!
As of now, I have them cornered in just the bathroom. I think i finally got rid of them in the rest of the basement.
Luckily they didn't make their way upstairs.

I tried a bunch of things. Vacuumed over and over. I used flea bombs. Three different types of sprays, including IGR, (insect growth regulator). I spread diatomaceous earth everywhere. What a mess that was. I used shallow lids filled with soapy water. I used flea traps that have a nightlight and sticky pads to catch them.
Between the soapy water and flea traps, I literally caught thousands and thousands of them.

How do those things survive without a host for so long? I thought they needed the host's blood to reproduce.

Does anyone have any other remedies?

Those things gross me out. Whenever I had to go down there, I rolled up my pants legs and pulled my white socks up. I would run outside and pick them off my white socks. Then I'd have the heebie-geebies for the rest of the day. Paranoid that they were on me and spread to the rest of the house.
Uhggg, I'm itching right now thinking about it.

 

[jgrandmont]

so you have polled a vast amount of scientists and they disagree?

I didn't need to conduct a poll. Many others have already done that.

 

[jgrandmont]

the idea that we are wrong cause we are dumb and stupid and not scientists aint gonna fly either.

 

[JamieB]

Fleas will lay eggs that hatch when it’s warm enough. Do the sprays, traps, ensure there’s nothing for them to eat, and keep the temps over 75, they’ll die off if there’s nothing to eat and they can’t just sit in egg or larval stage due to cold. Alternatively, you could stick a few guinnies or chickens in there, but then you get their poo.... I live out in the country, and I pretty much just accept that I’ll fight them every year. Cats and dogs going in and out, I use a variety of flea sprays on the carpets, DE, and capstar on the critters as needed. I haven’t found a good anti flea tick Med to give them that isn’t prohibitively expensive for all these animals.

 

[poconojoe]

Fleas will lay eggs that hatch when it’s warm enough. Do the sprays, traps, ensure there’s nothing for them to eat, and keep the temps over 75, they’ll die off if there’s nothing to eat and they can’t just sit in egg or larval stage due to cold. Alternatively, you could stick a few guinnies or chickens in there, but then you get their poo.... I live out in the country, and I pretty much just accept that I’ll fight them every year. Cats and dogs going in and out, I use a variety of flea sprays on the carpets, DE, and capstar on the critters as needed. I haven’t found a good anti flea tick Med to give them that isn’t prohibitively expensive for all these animals.

Thanks for the reply.
So, you think I should bump up the heat to 75 so they hatch and die since they have no cats to feast on?
I always thought the opposite. Keep it cold down there, figuring they would die off. I didn't realize they will just hibernate until it got warm.

Sorry for hijacking this thread!

 

[mrsclem]

Pesky bugs are a part of spring! This is the year of the 17 year cicadas. SO looking forward to that.

 

[poconojoe]

Cicadas!
It's been a while.
Is that the same for everywhere or just in your area? How does that work?

Edit:
Ok, I looked it up and 15 states will be affected this year in the eastern part of the U.S.
They are calling them generation X.
My state, Pennsylvania is in fact one of them.

Thanks for the heads up!

 

[mrsclem]

I remember driving on the capitol beltway and they were piled up over the median.

 

[poconojoe]

They are big, ugly, have beady red eyes and destroy a lot of trees.
Hey, I wonder if they eat fleas and ticks?

 

[addy1]

They are saying 1.5 million per acre when they come out. Maryland is the epicenter of the hatching.
The noise will be unreal. And our puppy chases and eats bugs, he is going to go crazy

 

[BKHpondcritters]

Oh no! Not again! We had a brood in our area last summer, too! I don't mind them - think they're interesting, really - but one of my dogs thought they were a delicacy & she spent hours rooting around the forest floor looking for them like a pig on a truffle hunt! She actually wore a sore spot on her nose! And I had to explain to her (more than once) that the only thing grosser than a dog who eats a lot of cicadas, is a dog who eats a lot of cicadas, vomits them up & then eats the cicada vomit.
From last summer:

The rotten, totally unremorseful, cicada eating dog:

 

[addy1]

We will need to control the little one, it will make him sick.

 

[TheFishGuy]

Spring Is here..... for today at least

I pulled the lilly up from the bottom of the pond and did some leaf cleanout, I am surprised that the lily actually has a bud poking up and is getting ready to leaf out again!

 

[poconojoe]

They are saying 1.5 million per acre when they come out. Maryland is the epicenter of the hatching.
The noise will be unreal. And our puppy chases and eats bugs, he is going to go crazy

Yeah, I read that...1.5 million per acre. That's nuts!

 

[JamieB]

Thanks for the reply.
So, you think I should bump up the heat to 75 so they hatch and die since they have no cats to feast on?
I always thought the opposite. Keep it cold down there, figuring they would die off. I didn't realize they will just hibernate until it got warm.

Sorry for hijacking this thread!

Kinda like ick, if it’s too warm for them to hibernate, they’ll hunt for food. If you have no reason to go down there, tape up door jams, windows, electrical outlets, etc, just need good masking tape to bar them from moving to other areas. Seal it off, up the heat, put out all your bombs and traps, and then check again a few months later. If it’s cold, they’ll wait it out, but if it’s warm, they don’t have such a good option, and will actively hunt for a host, burn up their energy reserves, and die. We moved into a house at one point that had them horribly. Sealed up the house, bombed it, then again once it was warm out, cleared out all the previous tenets stuff, bombed it again, then deep cleaned. That was a three month project of bombing, cleaning, and it seemed that by removing places for them to hide, heat, and bombs, we seriously reduced them. They did like you described, where you could see swarms of them climbing when we first went in. We were buying that place, so it was worth it, but then ended up loosing it because after all our work, the lady reneged on the deal and sold it out from under us.