Phorid flies, drain flies, fungus gnats, fruit flies, house flies, blow flies – can you tell them apart? Probably not, you just know that something annoying with wings has invaded your home and is driving you nuts. Fortunately, the experts at Colonial know flies and can solve your problem. Killing individual flies will give you
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1. The cat flea is the main flea pest, even on dogs. If your dog has fleas, they are almost certainly the species known as “cat fleas.” There is a dog flea, too, but it’s much less common and your dog won’t know the difference. The two types look the same, act the same, and
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Question: I have lots of these red and black bugs crawling on my house! Some of them are starting to get inside. Do they bite? What are they? Answer: It sounds like you have boxelder bugs. Fortunately, they do not bite and will not cause damage to your home other than maybe some staining if
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As we approach the end of August, it’s time to start thinking about how you are going to keep all those late season insects out of your house. Some insects such as yellowjacket workers die off in the fall, but those insects with overlapping generations often look for places to spend the winter instead. That
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Deer ticks (correctly called blacklegged ticks) are our smallest disease-carrying ticks. And that’s part of the problem. All stages of this tick can carry and transmit Lyme disease: larval stage, nymph, and adult tick. One of the reasons they can so easily attach and feed is that they are so hard to see. The adult
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Every year at the end of the summer we get those humpbacked spidery crickets in our house, but this year we have something different. They’re pretty big and almost totally black. They must be crickets because they jump and chirp. Did they come in from outside? H. H., Arlington, MA You’re probably seeing invading field
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Over the past week we’ve seen quite a few tiny insects on the walls in our new townhouse. We’ve been told that they are plaster beetles but no one seems to know anything more about them. What do they do? C. G., Jamaica Plain, MA We’ll assume they are plaster beetles, but know that these
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I need some information about fourid flies? They’re driving us nuts! For about 6 weeks we’ve had tiny little black flies in the house that get in your face and land on you. They’re about the size of those fruit flies, but we actually had them identified by our extension office and they said they
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Centipedes are not insects, although they are related to insects. One clue is that insects have 6 legs, centipedes have many more. Although they’re often called “hundred-leggers,” the typical adult centipede has about 15 pairs of legs for a total of 30. They have one pair of legs per body segment and actually add segments
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