No-Spray Tick Control & Outdoor Protection

Transcript of Gene’s video on how to get rid of ticks:

Hi, Gene here. I’d like to invite you to spend a few minutes with me as we talked about the relationship between ticks, mice, and Lyme disease. Meet Ixodes scapularis, otherwise known as the black-legged or deer tick, which is the main vector of Lyme disease and Powassan virus to humans.

Understanding the tick lifecycle helps us create pest control strategies to prevent the spread of disease to humans and our pets. Deer ticks undergo a two-year, three-stage lifecycle. Adult female ticks lay eggs on the ground in the spring. Adult females may carry Lyme disease but their eggs do not.

The eggs hatch into larvae during early summer and become infected with disease as they feed on infected mice. Mice are the primary reservoir hosts for the organisms that cause disease. The tick larvae molt to nymphs during the fall or the following spring. When the nymphs feed late spring or early summer, their hosts may become infected.

Humans are accidental hosts. Most cases of Lyme’s occur from late spring through summer. Of all tick stages, the nymph is the primary vector for transmission of disease to humans. In the fall, nymphs molt to adults that feed on white-tailed deer but rarely on humans.

White-tailed deer do not become infected with Lyme disease but amplify the tick population by providing a blood meal for adult ticks. Adult male and female ticks mate on the deer. The following spring, adult female ticks lay eggs, and the cycle is repeated. To simplify, adult ticks live mainly on deer, and females lay eggs on the ground in the spring.

The tick eggs then hatch in the spring and become larvae. The larvae then feed on mice and become infected with disease. It’s important to know that mice are the primary reservoir hosts of diseases. Once the tick larva has a blood meal, they drop to the ground. The next spring, the tick larva becomes a nymph.

It is this stage of the tick which mainly infects humans and their pets. When we show up at your home to do the tick treatment, the one thing we do not do is slather pesticide all over your property.

Our tick treatment is very specific, it’s very focused, and we look at three things. We kill non-attached ticks, we kill the larval-stage ticks that are attached to mice, and we focus on reducing rodent populations against the house. ♪

To treat and target the non-attached ticks, which are the ticks in the vegetation that are waiting for a host to walk by so they can grab onto them and get a blood meal, we target these ticks by focusing on transition zones, which are the spaces between the shady area and the bright sunny lawn.

That might be a space between the tree line, it might be a space between the neighbor’s house, it might be a space between the mature planting bed and the lawn. All of these places are transition zones, and what we do is we come in with a granular clay-based product, is very effective for targeting ticks. We put down…it’s about an 8 to 10-foot-wide band all the way around the property.

We’re not out, you know, slathering stuff around, killing everything, we’re trying to be very specific and very focused on targeting non-attached ticks. When we target attached ticks that are actively feeding and taking a blood meal from mice, we use what’s called a tick tube.

So what happens is once that band has been put down, we go outside the band around the transition zones and we install tick tubes about every 50 linear feet. What a tick tube is, is a piece of cardboard about six inches long.

It is stuffed with natural cotton that’s been lightly treated with a 7.5% permethrin. The mice find these things, they take the cotton, they use it as bedding material, they lay in it, their babies lay in it. And as they’re laying in this material, they are self-medicating with permethrin and they are killing all of the ticks that are attached to them.

It is very effective. Well, the last part of our tick program is reducing rodent populations directly around the foundation of the home. We do that with rodent bait stations, and there’s usually about four stations per house.

It’s a double benefit because during the fall, winter, and spring, mice are not getting into the house, we go into the next pest season with a reduced rodent population, and that put us way ahead against the fight on ticks.