Q. I’ve asked the pest control technician that comes to my apartment to leave me some of those cockroach bait stations so I can use them between his visits. He says he can’t do that. Why not? These look just like the same bait stations I could buy in the grocery store and our property pays for his services.
A. There are several very good reasons why the technician can’t leave pesticides with you (and yes, the bait stations do contain pesticides).
VIEW MOREQ. Today, my daughter and I ate lunch in a place that could be called a “dive.” After she finished her mac & cheese, we found a dead cockroach in the bottom of the bowl!! Of course I complained loudly to the manager. They were very apologetic about it and didn’t charge us, but I want to know what are the chances that my daughter could get sick from eating cockroach-contaminated food?
VIEW MOREHard-working silkworm larvae have been used for centuries to spin silk strands into cocoons that are then painstakingly unwound, braided into silk threads, and processed to produce silk fabric. Poor silkworms, scientists have decided that their silk is just not good enough. They’ve genetically engineered the silkworms to produce spider silk instead by inserting DNA with spider silk code into the larvae.
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Widow spiders are rare, and brown recluse spiders are not native to New England, but I’ve heard that the very common Yellow sac spider may be dangerous. Is that true?
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I’ll be really upfront and say ‘I hate ticks’. Ticks are like little mobile biological weapons labs! Ticks are the number one disease vector in the United States and are second only to mosquitoes worldwide. They are efficient transmitters of the bacterium that cause Lyme disease, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, ehrlichiosis, and tularemia. Ticks can also carry and transmit several different viruses that cause encephalitis, and a malaria-like protozoan (Babesia microti), which causes babesiosis.
VIEW MOREQ. I recently sighted a strange, many legged creature scuttling around my kitchen floor. It was about 2 inches long and quickly hid when I moved. What the heck could that be and should I be worried?
VIEW MOREI’m a fan of most arachnids such as spiders, scorpions, and harvestmen. Why you ask? Because they mostly hunt for a living, use venom, have fangs, etc. You know, creepy, cool stuff like that!! I could go on and on, but there is one group of arachnids I have absolutely no use for and that would be the ticks.
VIEW MOREQ. When I emptied a bag of dry dog food yesterday I noticed tiny moving things in the bottom of the bag. You could barely see them. It looked like the leftover dog food dust was moving. Are these some kind of mite? Will it hurt my dog if he ate them?
VIEW MOREQ. We have these very strange insects in our basement. They’re light brown, about an inch long with very long legs. They look kind of like a spider but they jump—a lot, and high. I find them just downstairs and mostly around the outside door to the basement and in the hot water heater closet. When I open the door to that closet, they start jumping at me and scare me to death! Is this some kind of a jumping spider and why do I have so many?
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