Ways to control Pests in your home

 

Several house beetles, various moths, and booklice can destroy materials, objects, and building parts. Termites, cockroaches, and other pests or insects are also common in museums and libraries, and their presence results in even greater damage to wood and paper materials. What is worse than mice or cockroaches feeding on breadcrumbs in your kitchen? It is finding them munching on invaluable paintings and important artifacts in your museum or library. These pests are responsible for a lot of damage to museum objects, historic books, and in buildings of historical or architectural importance. Insects do not always infest all items in equal ways, however. At the highest risk of infestation are natural history collections, dried insect collections, dry plant materials, stuffed animals, items containing fur, and keratin or chitin-based materials. Usually, items made from these vulnerable materials are stored together in dark areas, making the spread of infestation easier and more successful.

 

Although isolation of contaminated items is not an IPM treatment per se, this method can be used to indicate the presence of an active infestation, which is a crucial part of any IPM plan. Isolating, inspecting, and cleaning items entering the institution helps avoid granting pests access to the rest of the collection and building. In the past, pest control Brisbane in such collection-holding institutions involved regular applications of insecticides to the infested areas and the objects themselves. Recent health and safety concerns, however, have convinced many institutions to move away from spraying toxic chemicals in favor of a combination of proactive and preventative measures collectively. Freezing, also known as a controlled low-temperature treatment, is common pest control Brisbane and inspection method in museums.

 

Freezing is also carried out by some museums as a preventative measure whenever collections are moved into a new facility or if bulk collections that cannot be individually inspected are acquired. A lot of museums use baiting systems, typically using a nontoxic material, to instigate large-scale consumption within the pest population. When insect workers are seen feeding, the original nontoxic bait is replaced with bait containing a slow-acting insect growth regulator that ends up disrupting the breeding cycle of the colony. As the worker population is reduced, the colony soon starts collapsing and dying. This method is particularly successful at eradicating subterranean termites and is used as a safer treatment option because it eliminates the poisoning of non-target insects.

 

Heat treatment for infested artifacts is perhaps the most effective pest control Brisbane for ensuring 100% efficacy in eradicating insect pests. Museum managers prefer this method for treating both small individual objects and entire multi-story buildings. It is inexpensive compared to other treatments, easy to conduct, and can be applied to a variety of objects. The use of atmospheric gases such as nitrogen or argon gas in sealed enclosures to eradicate insect infestation of museum objects is another effective alternative to toxic substances. This method works by introducing gases that reduce the oxygen levels in an infested area to 0.1%, which interferes with the glucose production of insect pests, resulting in weight loss and eventually death. Almost all art objects can be treated with this pest control.