Fire ants are here in Vancouver and apparently getting worse. While fire ants have been in the news and have been a big problem in the United States for many years, we thought we'd been lucky here in BC so far...

Or so we thought....

Ahh springtime ... birds chirping, sun shining (finally!) and carpenter ant swarmers flying. If you are unfortunate enough to have a carpenter ant nest established inside your home, you may be witness to the annual spring emergence of winged carpenter ants flying en masse into your living space.

What happens is this - mature colonies of ants produce winged reproductive stages which overwinter inside a protected nest, then when the weather warms up in the spring the winged ants emerge, sometimes in huge numbers, to fly out and mate during flite then expand their population.  When the carpenter ants are flying, it literally means love is in the air! If this happens inside your home, don't panic - the winged ants can be sucked up by a vacuum, and most of them die naturally anyway - their job is simply to mate, and only the successfully mated female ants survive for more than a week or so.

Health Canada has issued a warning on Insectide Chalk being sold in Canada. This product is sold under a few different names but none of them are registered for use in Canada. One of the main components of insecticide chalk is a highly toxic pesticide.

Children are particularly at risk from insecticide chalk because they can easily mistake the product for blackboard or sidewalk chalk and play with it or put it in their mouths. Overexposure to some chemicals found in insecticidal chalk can cause vomiting, stomach pains, convulsions, tremors and loss of consciousness. Serious allergic reactions are also possible.

Spiders are amazing creatures - yes, there are many of us that suffer from aracnopobia but they really are amazing.

Spider webs are currently being studied at MIT by the civil and environmental engineering department. It is already known that the silk spiders use to build their webs is one of the strongest materials known(on a pound-for-pound basis, it’s stronger than steel) but it’s the material’s unusual combination of strength and stretchiness that makes it exceptional. They have found that webs can be quite damaged without actually failing. Damage tends to be localized, affecting just a few threads — the place where a bug got caught in the web and flailed around, for example. This localized damage can simply be repaired, rather than replaced.

Welcome to Assured Environmental Solutions!

We provide professional integrated pest management solutions throughout Metro Vancouver and the Fraser Valley. From homes and Strata properties, hotels to industrial food processing plants, we do it all! We provide services for a wide varieity of pests including rats, mice, cockroaches, silverfish, ants (including pharaoh ants and carpenter ants), spiders, wasps and more.  Environmentally responsible pest management with excellent service and great advice, we believe everyone deserves a pest free environment!

Confirming you have bed bugs can sometimes be one of the hardest parts of managing an infestation. 

Assured Thermal Solutions is proud to announce that we can now offer DNA testing for the presence of bed bugs!  With recent scientific advances DNA testing for bed bugs has become fast, easy and scientifically verifiable. 

A study linking bed bugs in Vancouver with MRSA bacteria was released today by Emerging Infectious Diseases, a publication of the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Preventions.  One of the authors of the study, Dr. Marc Romney, is from St. Paul's Hospital here in Vancouver.

To date, bed bugs have not been known to spread disease and there is no clear evidence that the bed bugs found on the patients or their belongings had spread MRSA. It is also not clear if the bacteria originated with the bed bugs or if the bugs picked it up from already infected people.

Yesterday (April 19th) we removed this years first batch of new born baby raccoons from a clients attic.  Mom raccoon had been causing quite a racket making an entry hole in the roof and walking around inside.  When we arrived on the scene we discovered that she had successfully made a den and had her young.