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Hitchhiker Bugs: Let Them Hop On and You Bring Them Home (or Not!) · PEST PROSpectives

• 0:08
  Richard Piet: I'm Richard Piet.
• 0:09
  Richard Piet: Welcome back to PEST PROSpectivess.
• 0:12
  Richard Piet: From the Pest Pros of Michigan, second word there, pros.
• 0:16
  Richard Piet: This is what we're talking about.
• 0:18
  Richard Piet: Talking with the pros about pest control and some of the things maybe you didn't know about or don't think about when it comes to controlling the pests that might be in your environment.
• 0:30
  Richard Piet: Associate certified entomologist Tony Sorentino's back with us on PEST PROSpectives.
• 0:36
  Richard Piet: Today, we're talking about hitchhiker bugs.
• 0:39
  Richard Piet: Now, I'm a child of the 70s, Tony.
• 0:42
  Richard Piet: So I remember vaguely riding in my parents' car, and there'd be somebody standing on the side of the road with their thumb out.
• 0:52
  Richard Piet: And I know we're talking to some people today who are going, What?
• 0:56
  Richard Piet: What is that about?
• 0:57
  Richard Piet: That was hitchhiking back then.
• 1:00
  Richard Piet: People would thumb a ride.
• 1:02
  Richard Piet: They'd stand on the side of the road and thumb a ride to get somewhere.
• 1:06
  Richard Piet: And you would, yes, get in a stranger's car and uh ride as far as they were willing to take you toward your destination.
• 1:14
  Richard Piet: Not the same thing, but the concept is similar here.
• 1:19
  Tony Sorrentino: Picked up along the way.
• 1:20
  Tony Sorrentino: Picked up along the way.
• 1:22
  Richard Piet: Exactly.
• 1:23
  Richard Piet: Hitchhiker bugs don't even stick their thumb out, they just hop on.
• 1:27
  Richard Piet: And uh that's what we're talking about today.
• 1:31
  Richard Piet: And the notion of that might seem a little bit scary or icky or something.
• 1:37
  Richard Piet: So we're really trying to understand what that means.
• 1:41
  Richard Piet: What are hitchhiker bugs anyway, Tony?
• 1:44
  Tony Sorrentino: Typically, hitchhiker bugs are pests that don't they don't always walk in or through the cracks in your foundation or fly in through an open window.
• 1:51
  Tony Sorrentino: Uh instead, they come in with us, and I refer to it as trafficking in because you pick them up at one location and you traffic them to another location.
• 2:00
  Tony Sorrentino: What we're talking about, they ride in on our our luggage, our our boxes, even our clothes or our pets.
• 2:06
  Tony Sorrentino: So, like the most common ones are like German cockroaches or bedbugs or stored product pests like your your cigarette beetles or flower beetles or uh Indian meal moths, bed bugs on our luggage, or you can pick them up if you're someplace where bed bugs are at.
• 2:25
  Tony Sorrentino: But um, the classic top-of-the-list heavyweight champ for uh hitchhiking bugs is bed bugs.
• 2:33
  Richard Piet: Yeah, I think folks are probably of the ones you just listed, they're most familiar with the notion of bed bugs, and we've done, in fact, an episode about that.
• 2:43
  Richard Piet: So check it out when you uh subscribe to Pest Perspectives, you'll find it in there.
• 2:48
  Richard Piet: But uh, yes, we know about that one for sure.
• 2:51
  Richard Piet: All you have to do is man, set your suitcase down where some are, put your clothes down where some might be, and they gravitate toward that, and we might not even realize we're bringing them home with us.
• 3:08
  Tony Sorrentino: Then a gravid female bed bug could potentially then travel with you and lay eggs in your luggage, or lay eggs once you get to where you're going, and that's the beginning of an infestation.
• 3:21
  Tony Sorrentino: Yeah, like that's that's how it happens is the bedbugs are not gonna walk into your house.
• 3:26
  Tony Sorrentino: You're you're never gonna have a situation.
• 3:28
  Tony Sorrentino: I've never seen it in my experience where the bedbugs walked in from the outside.
• 3:34
  Tony Sorrentino: That could happen in a multifamily living situation where shared walls are are an issue, but bed bugs are you're not gonna wake up one day at your home and just all of a sudden there's there's bed bugs.
• 3:46
  Tony Sorrentino: It's not like ants, it's not like flies where you leave the window open or you have the door open or the garbage is stored too close to the garage.
• 3:54
  Tony Sorrentino: Why are all these flies in here?
• 3:56
  Richard Piet: Uh-huh.
• 3:57
  Richard Piet: Yeah, uh, they like to latch on and come along for the ride.
• 4:02
  Richard Piet: All right.
• 4:02
  Richard Piet: So, bed bugs we know about.
• 4:04
  Richard Piet: You mentioned a certain kind of cockroach, too.
• 4:07
  Richard Piet: German cockroaches.
• 4:10
  Tony Sorrentino: German cockroaches.
• 4:11
  Richard Piet: You don't have to go to Germany for that, do you?
• 4:13
  Tony Sorrentino: No, no.
• 4:14
  Tony Sorrentino: That's the that's the terminology that's used to identify that species.
• 4:18
  Tony Sorrentino: They are domestic pests, they they live and thrive right alongside humans.
• 4:24
  Tony Sorrentino: Water sanitation conditions, standing water, or uh poor sanitary conditions, poor garbage management, poor food storage.
• 4:34
  Tony Sorrentino: The all of these things can be a contributing factor.
• 4:37
  Tony Sorrentino: Now, these pests are drawn to food, they're here looking for food.
• 4:42
  Tony Sorrentino: That's core essential to most pests.
• 4:44
  Tony Sorrentino: They're looking for a food source.
• 4:46
  Tony Sorrentino: So sometimes the grocery store could have them.
• 4:50
  Tony Sorrentino: You could get a box that had some in it.
• 4:52
  Tony Sorrentino: There are so many different ways that you could wind up with cockroaches at your house.
• 4:57
  Richard Piet: I'm trying to imagine a cockroach hitching a ride.
• 5:01
  Richard Piet: So they're usually pretty large, are they not?
• 5:04
  Richard Piet: Not like a bedbug that would be hidden.
• 5:07
  Tony Sorrentino: Bedbugs are small.
• 5:08
  Tony Sorrentino: Typically, a a grown adult bedbug is the size of an apple seed, uh, or something relative to that.
• 5:14
  Tony Sorrentino: Uh German cockroaches can be up to a half inch in size.
• 5:18
  Tony Sorrentino: So that's more substantial, but they are negatively phototrophic.
• 5:23
  Tony Sorrentino: They're adverse to light, they don't like to be out in the light.
• 5:26
  Tony Sorrentino: If you're seeing numerous cockroaches in broad daylight, uh, you have a higher level infestation that you're dealing with.
• 5:33
  Richard Piet: There's not enough room in the darkness for all of them.
• 5:36
  Richard Piet: That's what you're saying.
• 5:37
  Richard Piet: Terrible.
• 5:39
  Richard Piet: Yeah.
• 5:40
  Richard Piet: So you mentioned that these German cockroaches are happy to be around conditions where food is available.
• 5:47
  Richard Piet: You talked about sanitary conditions, or I should say, unsanitary conditions might be uh where they want to be.
• 5:55
  Richard Piet: But I think you're also saying they'll hitch a ride and go with you somewhere else.
• 6:00
  Tony Sorrentino: You you can traffic them, just like bed bugs, uh in food materials.
• 6:05
  Tony Sorrentino: They can travel in appliances, used appliances.
• 6:09
  Tony Sorrentino: Oh my.
• 6:09
  Tony Sorrentino: Uh so, like if you go buy a washer or dryer or a refrigerator or a stand-up freezer or microwave or a used TV.
• 6:19
  Tony Sorrentino: In some of those cases, you want to be very careful if you're if you're looking into those situations, uh, because you could inadvertently bring them into your own home.
• 6:27
  Tony Sorrentino: German cockroaches are one of the most severe pests.
• 6:30
  Tony Sorrentino: Nothing is beyond control, but it it just takes a longer period of time with uh an established high-level infestation.
• 6:39
  Richard Piet: You mentioned some beetles too that like to be hitchhikers.
• 6:42
  Tony Sorrentino: Oh, the uh are stored product pests.
• 6:45
  Tony Sorrentino: I went to a client's house, she was finding these little beetles in her room, they could fly.
• 6:51
  Tony Sorrentino: That's an indicator.
• 6:52
  Tony Sorrentino: Uh, I went out on the job because we were seeking the first role, and we talked about this when we talked about stored product pests.
• 6:59
  Tony Sorrentino: Because I'm gonna seek out the source, I'm gonna figure out why, why are they here?
• 7:03
  Tony Sorrentino: What are they eating, and what do we got to do to get rid of them?
• 7:07
  Richard Piet: Yeah.
• 7:07
  Tony Sorrentino: So as I'm walking through the house with her and she's showing me the places where the beetles are showing up.
• 7:12
  Tony Sorrentino: They're showing up where the light is, they're in the windowsills, they're in the kitchen, they're they're over here.
• 7:17
  Tony Sorrentino: Uh, we walked past and she said, they're all in that closet, too.
• 7:20
  Tony Sorrentino: And I looked in the closet and there's a box of milkbone dog biscuits.
• 7:25
  Tony Sorrentino: And I told her right then, I said, the beetles are in that, but we're gonna keep going.
• 7:29
  Tony Sorrentino: This is your this is your show.
• 7:31
  Tony Sorrentino: You tell me everything you need to tell me.
• 7:33
  Tony Sorrentino: And then uh after the whole inspection, we we identified it.
• 7:37
  Tony Sorrentino: I opened up the unopened box of biscuits that she bought at a garage sale, and it was literally full, hundreds and hundreds of larval stage beetles and adult beetles.
• 7:49
  Tony Sorrentino: And the it was I got my HEPA vacuum out and cleaned it up, and she didn't have any more issues after that.
• 7:54
  Tony Sorrentino: It's but she inadvertently carried it into her house.
• 7:58
  Tony Sorrentino: She bought that's a good deal, two big boxes of of milk bone dog biscuits.
• 8:02
  Tony Sorrentino: It's a good deal at a garage sale.
• 8:04
  Tony Sorrentino: So be mindful about buying even pet food, cat food, dog food, dry kibble that could be uh infested, you bring it to your house, you don't know about it.
• 8:15
  Tony Sorrentino: Now you've got these little bugs all in your house.
• 8:17
  Tony Sorrentino: Indian meal moths, same scenario.
• 8:19
  Tony Sorrentino: Uh stored product pests, dry goods.
• 8:21
  Tony Sorrentino: They just hitchhike in on your stuff that you're bringing into the house.
• 8:25
  Tony Sorrentino: So if you start seeing little moths, if you start seeing little beetles, yeah.
• 8:32
  Richard Piet: Well, you make a good point.
• 8:34
  Richard Piet: So this lady thought she was getting a terrific deal on dog biscuits at a garage sale and they were infested, which tell me if I'm wrong, I suspect that means they were sitting around for a while.
• 8:46
  Richard Piet: That's right.
• 8:47
  Richard Piet: And in a pet store, that probably wouldn't be the case.
• 8:50
  Richard Piet: The inventory turns over fast.
• 8:52
  Tony Sorrentino: Actually, we service pet stores for that reason because they run into these issues.
• 8:58
  Tony Sorrentino: There's a there's a couple of local pet stores that that we've serviced for this issue for stored product pests, for grain beetles, for cigarette beetles, for drugstore beetles, um, Indian meal moths.
• 9:10
  Tony Sorrentino: If the food is there, they will share.
• 9:12
  Tony Sorrentino: They don't care.
• 9:13
  Tony Sorrentino: And I didn't mean for that whole thing to rhyme, but it worked out.
• 9:16
  Tony Sorrentino: So here we are.
• 9:18
  Richard Piet: Well, I would suspect because a pet store is more mindful of these things, they deal with them a lot faster, unlike the example of the person who brought them from somebody else's garage and and had no idea.
• 9:31
  Richard Piet: This is incredible uh as to how this goes.
• 9:34
  Richard Piet: So when it comes to those food hitchhikers that you talked about, the German cockroaches, the beetles, the meal moths, how do we check that out?
• 9:44
  Richard Piet: How do we assure that we're not bringing them in with us, particularly if we're buying a box of dog biscuits?
• 9:50
  Richard Piet: We can't exactly open them again right there in the store.
• 9:54
  Tony Sorrentino: But then if you you open it when you get home and then store it in an airtight container where the pests can't get to it, then we're in business.
• 10:03
  Tony Sorrentino: And this is all sanitation and and behavioral changes that are made.
• 10:07
  Tony Sorrentino: I'm not storing dry goods in a box that has multiple gaps, cracks, and crevices where any pest could literally get in there, like the it's literally taped across the top.
• 10:18
  Tony Sorrentino: So uh even sealed food.
• 10:20
  Tony Sorrentino: I've done Indian meal moths, and the source was Quaker oatmeal, the the instant oatmeal packs, and they had eaten through the little paper bags.
• 10:30
  Tony Sorrentino: The box was sealed.
• 10:31
  Tony Sorrentino: So I literally was we're going to seek out the source, we're opening up all the groceries because we couldn't solve it with traditional methods.
• 10:38
  Tony Sorrentino: We thought we got it, we were wrong, back again.
• 10:42
  Richard Piet: Well, you it's interesting you brought up oatmeal because that's the first thing I was thinking about is the boxes of cereal in your pantry.
• 10:48
  Richard Piet: Those are not airtight, so the recommendation would be to try and use airtight containers as much as you can.
• 10:57
  Tony Sorrentino: Airtight containers, and it adds to the freshness and stability of your food over time, too.
• 11:01
  Tony Sorrentino: That's also true.
• 11:02
  Tony Sorrentino: It's multifaceted, rodents, pests, moisture, yeah, helps freshness and keeps them out.
• 11:09
  Tony Sorrentino: Yep.
• 11:10
  Richard Piet: All right.
• 11:10
  Richard Piet: Now we've talked about what complexities are involved with bed bugs and getting rid of those.
• 11:17
  Richard Piet: Again, listen to that bed bug episode.
• 11:19
  Richard Piet: You talked about the beetles in the example with the dog biscuits vacuuming them up, and it was over.
• 11:25
  Richard Piet: Is it generally that easy for some of these that like to be in dry goods?
• 11:30
  Tony Sorrentino: Remove the source, and then in some cases, we'll apply a residual like to windowsills where where the adults are drawn to, right?
• 11:39
  Tony Sorrentino: The the adults uh in many cases don't aren't the ones that cause damage.
• 11:44
  Tony Sorrentino: Those are the nuisance ones, those are the breeders, those are the ones that have already lived their life cycle doing damage to the stored goods.
• 11:51
  Tony Sorrentino: So they're leaving, they want to go to the windowsills.
• 11:54
  Tony Sorrentino: So we'll do an application to control any errant.
• 11:58
  Tony Sorrentino: If we're vacuuming them up, a residual application and removing the source, it's over with.
• 12:04
  Richard Piet: All right.
• 12:05
  Richard Piet: I'm just sort of snickering a little bit at your comment.
• 12:08
  Richard Piet: They're leaving.
• 12:09
  Richard Piet: Yep.
• 12:10
  Richard Piet: The the source is gone, so we're out of here.
• 12:13
  Richard Piet: And you're catching them at the exit.
• 12:15
  Richard Piet: Yeah.
• 12:15
  Richard Piet: Yeah.
• 12:16
  Richard Piet: All right.
• 12:16
  Richard Piet: So if uh you've noticed this issue, certainly the Pest Pros of Michigan and their experts can talk a little bit about how to go about dealing with it and help you find that source and uh deal with it.
• 12:32
  Richard Piet: Bedbugs, of course, is a little more complicated, and uh you certainly can ask about that as well.
• 12:39
  Richard Piet: Pest Pros website, link is in the show notes for this episode of Pest Perspectives.
• 12:44
  Richard Piet: You can click right on through and find that and talk with Tony and the team who can come and deal with that.
• 12:52
  Richard Piet: Boy, now you have me wanting to go open up all of my oatmeal packets and check everything.
• 12:58
  Tony Sorrentino: Might not be a bad idea.
• 12:59
  Tony Sorrentino: Yeah, I guess not.
• 13:00
  Tony Sorrentino: Drop them in a Tupperware when you're done.
• 13:02
  Tony Sorrentino: Go open up all those boxes.
• 13:04
  Tony Sorrentino: Maybe you could organize them.
• 13:06
  Richard Piet: Well, wouldn't that be something?
• 13:07
  Richard Piet: That would be an added benefit.
• 13:08
  Richard Piet: The pantry would be a lot neater, wouldn't it?
• 13:10
  Richard Piet: Yes, sir.
• 13:11
  Richard Piet: All right.
• 13:11
  Richard Piet: Tony Sorrentino, Pest Pros of Michigan, giving us some more pest prospectives.
• 13:17
  Richard Piet: Thanks, Tony.
• 13:18
  Tony Sorrentino: Yes, sir.
• 13:18
  Tony Sorrentino: Thank you, Richard.