Almost everyone has to deal with pests.  Whether indoor or outdoors, we need to think about eco friendly pest control or green alternatives to toxic pesticides and insecticides.

The Bugman had a great list of things to do to help prevent pests. Some of the best tips:

• Check your outside doors. If you can see light coming in from under the door or you can slide a piece of paper under the door, a bug can crawl in. You may want to install door sweeps or thresholds to keep them out.
• Check for openings around pipes and cables that penetrate an outside wall and seal any you find. These are excellent places for ants and wasps to enter.
• Make sure all of your screens are in good repair and that the doors and windows close properly.
• Install hardware cloth on all attic, roof and crawl space vents in order to prevent rodents and insects from entering. If you have a chimney, make sure you have a chimney cap.
• Keep debris away from the building as this will attract all sorts of insects, spiders, centipedes and rodents.
• Go around the building periodically with a broom and knock down any spider webs. Spiders will not stay in an area where they are continually harassed.
• If you have playground equipment, make sure you plug up the ends of the pipes on the equipment to prevent wasps from setting up housekeeping in them.
• Do not leave outside lights on any longer than necessary. Lights attract a number of bugs and all sorts of things that eat bugs.
• Cut back any branches on trees or shrubs that touch the facility. Ants will often use the limbs of trees and shrubs to gain access to buildings.
• Keep flies away by hanging a zipped block bag half filled with water on your doors or windows that get sunlight. This will confuse the flies.
• Keep rabbits and other small animals away by hanging CDs. This will confuse the animals.
• Yellow Corn Meal spread around the base of plants will control cut-worms.

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Last Update: 2/2/2017

The weed killer Roundup is facing lawsuits over claims that it gave people cancer, non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. I saw a newspaper article with lawyers looking for more victims.

The lawyers base their cancer lawsuit claims on a 2015 report from the International Agency for Research on cancer, IARC – a division of the WHO. It found Roundup aka glyphosate to be “probably carcinogenic.” The report says glyphosate caused cancer in lab tests on animals and found that the chemical damaged DNA in human cells.

The Scotts Company sells the popular line of pesticides Ortho Home Defense MAX as well as Roundup. They produce everything from bug killers to rodent control products to Scotts Miracle Grow.

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Many of us have read about the mysterious declining population of honey bees due to Colony Collapse Disorder. Since 2006 colonies of commercial bees have been slowly wiped out.

During the winter of 2006-2007, some beekeepers began to report unusually high losses of 30-90 percent of their hives. As many as 50 percent of all affected colonies demonstrated symptoms inconsistent with any known causes of honey bee death:

• Sudden loss of a colony’s worker bee population with very few dead bees found near the colony.
• The queen and brood (young) remained, and the colonies had relatively abundant honey and pollen reserves.

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