SERVING MIDDLESEX COUNTY SINCE 1984

Learn more about our pest control services or check out a few highlights about Weston.

Check out our podcast on a pest control project we did in Natick MA

Below is the transcript of the podcast if you prefer to read it: 

John Maher: Hi, I’m John Maher. I’m here today with Zach Ciras, Quality Manager with Colonial Pest Control. Today our topic is pest control in Weston, Massachusetts. Welcome Zach.

Zach Ciras: Thanks John.

Pest Control in Weston

John: Sure. So Zach, are there any sort of general things about pest control in Weston that you’ve noticed over the years as you’ve gone out and done jobs in that town?

Zach: Weston is a great community, a more affluent community, I would say. We have larger homes, more expanse for folks to pay attention to. If you have a family of five living in a 1,300 square foot home, they’re going to notice everything and be able to be right on top of any issue. When you have a larger home, like we see a lot of those in Weston, you might have an issue with some water damage causing some rot, inviting some carpenter ants or termites into that area on one end of the house. You might not frequent that area of the house. So you might not know it’s a problem until it’s become more of an issue than it is if you would catch it right away in a smaller home.

It is a heavily wooded area as well. Very suburban, very large sprawl of yards, wood lines, a lot of shrubbery, great landscaping in this town, and a lot of older homes too. So, there is a lot of life, a lot of things that find their way into the house from the surrounding, beautiful, natural life, and they just need to be reminded where their boundaries are.

Another trend that we do see in Weston is clothing moths, my least favorite pest, I would say. Clothing moths loose are deleterious to clothes, to rugs, to any natural fibers. They’ll breed in just about anything, including dust behind a bed. They’ll breed in the dust behind a bed. So, they’re really taking advantage of every little thing that we give them. A lot of homes in Weston have central air. They have some kind of ductwork, whether it’s a house from 1830 that has the old cast iron grates or it’s a newer home with a beautiful central air system. The dust, the dog hair, the cat hair, the human hair and skin particles, those tend to build up in those areas. You’ll have things like clothing moths take advantage of those and start breeding in areas that are very tough to get to.

Pest Control Services in Weston

John: Okay, that’s interesting. Could you give me an example of a pest-control job that you’ve done in Weston?

Zach: Sure, I’ll give you the trifecta. So we have a home. Initially, she called because she was seeing large black ants in the kitchen marching around. Nothing crazy, but she’s seeing a few every day. She’s seeing them during the day too, which is an important point because most ants are actually nocturnal creatures, so what you see during the day is only the tip of the iceberg. I’m sure as soon as she goes to sleep, 10 o’clock, 11 o’clock at night, there’s probably 30 or 40 ants marching around, when she sees three or four during the day. So, she called because she was seeing the ants. Carpenter ants are pretty easy to see. They’re large, they’re black. They don’t care if you’re looking at them or not. They’re pretty visible.

We got out there, we did the full treatment for carpenter ants. We did find a couple of areas where they had started nesting, a couple satellite nests. She had this nice section off the back. She had a screened in deck, almost a three season room, stairways down to the pool, and then a really beautiful flower garden right off there. They were actually breeding and nesting primarily in the railroad ties that kept the flower garden dirt up. Then they started to expand and get into the house. We got out, took care of the carpenter ants. She was very happy with that.

While we were out there, we did notice that there was quite a bit of mouse dropping activity in the basement. It’s a fully finished basement. Of course, one section was a storage room. The rest of it is the drop ceilings, a couple of utility closets. But we could see that the mice had been there for quite a while. We did a full exclusion for her as well and took care of her existing mice population between snap traps and chemical controls. We also used rodenticide anticoagulant baits inside for persistent cases out of reach of the kids, of course.

We went around the whole outside of the house. We found quite a few openings that the mice had been using routinely. A beautiful bay window in the front off the sitting room, underneath that area there was the bay window kind of pops out a little bit, it’s fairly low to the ground and it was brick all the way up. Underneath the bay window underneath the pop up, when the builders are building it, they’re not necessarily thinking about pests. They’re thinking, “We’`ll close this off well enough, it’ll be good enough.” The bay window with these triangles on either side and the square in the middle they used pretty rough cuts to try to get it in there. So, there were good gaps on either side underneath that window. We were able to close those up pretty easily.

The difficult part with her though was that brick face on that same side from the window all the way up to the peak, it was all brick and mice are excellent climbers. They had been climbing, especially once we closed up that lower easier to get to hole, climbing up the side of the house, getting underneath the fascia board. Then there were big gaps where the brick and the wood came together because, of course, it was two dissimilar materials and not going to line up perfectly unless you put a lot of effort into that. She had some big gaps up there and the mice were getting into the attic from there as well.

It was really a whole house exclusion that we needed to do. She did have our unwelcome friends, the clothing moths. She had her kids, they were grown up, and one had gone to New York, gone to school, started a career out there, but decided to move back home, get a job closer to mom. Everybody’s growing up. A daughter had moved out with her boyfriend in college and then wanted to go and save up some money so they could buy a house and start their own family together. Both kids brought home nice cashmere sweaters, nice scarves. The son’s girlfriend actually had a nice felt hat. All these items were loaded with clothing moths.

It’s the nice things, the clothing moths really like the finer things in life. They started to spread through the house. With the history of mice that she’s had in the house for years before we got there, mice are essentially wearing little wool sweaters, so there were a lot of natural fibers, animal fibers that the moths could find with the pelts from the mice. It was really holistic how everything led to the other thing at this particular home.

John: Right. That’s really interesting. You said that Weston in general has a lot of houses that back up against wooded areas. Are there other types of pests that you notice are common when a house is right next to a wooded area like that?

Zach: Actually, we’ll stay with this house that I have in my mind with the ants, with the clothing moths, with the mice. We got her on a maintenance program, everything’s under control. Then one year she called me, she said, “Zach, I don’t know if these are the same ants I saw before, but there’s a lot of these black bugs with wings. They kind of look like small ants coming from my front door.”

I went out there. It was a warm day after it had rained the previous day. That’s typically when we see these swarms. It was termites. That’s another thing, common, nice house, you try to protect it and it’s really well built. But you still have all those trees. You have the cellulose found in the trees. Cellulose found in the old root systems. Termite’s job in nature is to eat that cellulose. They just don’t know where the line is between the dead tree stump in the backyard or the front door.

Apparently, she had some kind of crack underneath the front door under the tile in the entryway that we couldn’t see. There was probably some moisture in that area as well, so she had termite swarms coming up in that area. We were able to install the Sentricon termite bait elimination system around the entire perimeter of the house. In the meantime, I did do a liquid application into those cracks around the front door to at least contact as many as we could right off the bat. Then I did caulk up that area as well to at least stop all the swarms from coming in while the bait system is doing its job. So, she had the termites as well.

Another thing we see in Weston, nice homes, wood siding, trim that goes all the way down to the soil, especially with the nice landscaping that happens. That bark mulch can build up and build up and actually increase or decrease the distance between the wood trim of the house and the soil. The termites in wood, they’re all subterranean, and they’re all coming from under the soil looking for wood. So, they’re working their way up from the soil. Easy trip to work when there’s bark mulch directly touching the trim.

Another thing we see and we try to explain to folks is to rake that bark mulch away from the house. Actually, we recommend having some stones or some gravel in between the life with the bark mulch, and the trees, and the plants, and the termites, and the ants, and the house. Having a nice barrier, two to three feet would be great of stone instead of bark mulch. That’ll keep everything dryer and keep that distance between the food source really for the termites and then the soil where they’re coming from. So, that’s another thing that we do see a lot in Weston.

John: All right, that’s really great information, Zach, and thanks again for speaking with me today about pest control in Weston, Massachusetts.

Zach: My pleasure. Thanks John.

John: For more information, you can visit the Colonial Pest Control Website at colonialpest.com, or call 1-800-525-8084. That’s 1-800-525-8084.

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