Yes, you have bugs

Photo: Contributed - XtremerX

Carpenter Ant would like a wood cocktail, please.

There are quite a few professions that take people into strangers’ homes, almost always for a limited purpose or task. In most cases, the task is confined to a small portion of the home and not much attention is paid to the surrounding environment. 

This is not the case for professional home inspectors, who will even view areas that may not have been seen in months or years. As you can appreciate, home inspectors see a lot of bugs.

I can tell you this: You are not alone in your home. 

Since the New Year, I’ve seen flies, termites, carpenter ants, black widow spiders, dormant wasps, bedbugs, carpet beetles, praying mantis, cockroaches, crickets, stink bugs, silverfish, weevils and fleas. Of course there were also bees, and plenty of ants to be seen, and spiders, spiders, spiders. 

If you are scared of bugs, being a professional home inspector may not be for you (also. don’t forget rats and mice).

Other than ladybugs and butterflies, I have to say that bugs are generally ugly. I suppose the bugs that home inspectors see are viewed as particularly ugly because of the piercing and sucking mouthparts, antennae, and segmented body parts, hundreds of legs, stingers and exoskeletons. 

Insects are smart, and they know that being out in the open can be detrimental to their well-being. Most prefer to live unnoticed amongst us, sharing our houses undetected and in peaceful co-habitation. 

Most bugs in the house aren’t dangerous. In fact, the vast majority of bugs in our homes are not doing harm, either, and some are actually doing good by feeding on other insects in your home. Insects can be found where home inspectors know to look: On visible surfaces, including those accessible under and behind furniture, around baseboards, ceilings, and on shelves and other surfaces. Some insects wander in, and just can’t get back out. 

In home inspection-speak; we classify insects two ways: a) nuisance bugs and b) wood-destroying organisms (WDO). 

It’s the WDO’s we aren’t partial to, because they eat wood found in our homes. WDO’s are insects like carpenter ants and termites. 

Nuisance insects don’t cause much concern because an infestation, if there is one, is always treatable. If you are a pest control expert, the future is looking good, because effective traditional chemicals treatments are being weakened ,and repetitive eco-friendly methods requiring repetitive visits are becoming the norm. For this reason, I think we are going to be seeing more bugs as time goes by.

We know that we are sharing our home with insects, but how many? And what species? 

Well, a recent study by Matt Bertone, an entomologist at North Carolina State University, found that humans share their homes with more than 550 different types of insects. 

Fifty homes were sampled with an average size of just over 2,000 square feet (ranging from 840 to 4,833 square feet in area). During the course of sampling 554 rooms, in the 50 homes, over 10,000 insect specimens were collected and identified (about 200 per home). Although the sample was very small, my pest control friends suggest that homes in the Okanagan are likely to have similar numbers to what was found in the study. 

The most commonly collected groups of insects were flies (23%), beetles (19%), spiders (16%), ants (15%). Book lice were found in 49 of the 50 homes sampled. Book lice are close relatives of parasitic lice and have a long evolutionary history of living, among other places, in close association with birds, mammals, and their nests. Dust mites were found in the majority of homes sampled (76%). 

One of the findings that surprised researchers was that only five of the 554 rooms they sampled did not contain any insect specimens.

The study found much smaller numbers of cockroaches (6%), fleas (10%), and bed bugs (0%) in the sampled homes, leaving one to think that the negative reputation of these insects is undeserved, unless, of course, you’ve had to eradicate them.

The good news is, if you are over 50 years old, or your reading vision began failing earlier in life, you won’t be able to see half of what this study mentions anyway.

This article is written by or on behalf of an outsourced columnist and does not necessarily reflect the views of Castanet.