Quick answer: Floodwater does not drown a fire ant colony — it relocates it. When Lakeland yards flood during summer storms, red imported fire ants link their bodies into floating rafts that carry the entire colony, queen included, until they hit dry ground. That is why new mounds appear in yards that never had them … Read more
Quick answer: Rats chew car wires because rodent incisors grow constantly and engine bays offer warm, sheltered gnawing spots. In Lakeland, the culprit is usually the roof rat — Florida’s most common rat — moving between trees, attics, and garages. Look for chewed insulation, droppings on the engine cover, and shredded nesting material under the … Read more
Quick answer: After a heavy Lakeland rain event floods low ground, two different rats move indoors for two different reasons – the ground-burrowing Norway rat pushed out of a flooded storm drain or canal bank, and the tree-climbing roof rat that was already living in your attic and is now more active because the wet … Read more
Quick answer: If you knocked down a mud tube on your slab and it’s back within a day or two after a heavy August rain, the colony is still active – subterranean termites rebuild fastest when soil moisture is highest, which in Lakeland means right after Central Florida’s rainy-season downpours. A rebuilt tube is not … Read more
Quick answer: If German cockroach gel bait worked at first and then stopped, the colony hasn’t necessarily “gotten smart” – some German cockroach populations develop a genetic aversion to glucose, a common sweetener in bait matrices, so they detect and avoid it without touching the actual insecticide. Rotating to a non-glucose bait formulation – something … Read more
Quick answer: Drywood termites (Cryptotermes brevis) don’t need soil contact the way subterranean termites do – they live entirely inside dry wood, which means the real warning signs in a Polk County home are small: pepper-flake-sized fecal pellets (frass), tiny kick-out holes, and piles of shed swarmer wings after a flight. Because there’s no mud … Read more
Quick answer: Ghost ants (Tapinoma melanocephalum) are one of Florida’s most common – and most frustrating – kitchen ants because a single colony can have dozens of queens spread across multiple satellite nests. Spraying the trail you can see often triggers “budding,” where the colony splits into new nests to avoid the threat. That’s why … Read more
Every spring, Polk County homeowners see the same thing: a sudden cloud of winged insects near a foundation, a porch light, or a window, and the same question follows – does a termite swarm mean my house is infested right now, or does it mean something else entirely? The honest answer is more nuanced than … Read more
Termite swarms in Polk County don’t always give much warning — a warm, humid evening after rain, and suddenly there are dozens of winged insects around a porch light or rising out of a spot in the yard. If that’s happening at your place right now, here’s how to read what you’re looking at and … Read more
If you’ve lived in Lakeland for more than a year, you already know the drill — sometime in May and again around September, lovebugs show up in numbers thick enough to coat a windshield on the I-4 corridor and swarm around porches and yards for a few weeks straight. They’re mostly a nuisance rather than … Read more