When cooler temperatures arrive, mice, rats, and other rodents that forage outside during spring and summer tend to head for warmer areas – like the inside of your house. Because rodents can compress their skeletons to squeeze through tiny gaps, even the smallest entry point can become a veritable rodent highway.
To safeguard your home, let’s take a look at a few tips for effective pest prevention for rodent infestations.
While rabbits are well-known for their prolific breeding habits, rodents like mice and rats aren’t far behind. Each healthy female mouse can have five to six litters per year (averaging six to eight pups per litter). Although mice only live a couple of years, they’re fertile for the vast majority of this time.
This means that a colony of two females and one male could balloon into an unmanageable infestation of more than 100 rodents within a year. Therefore, it’s important to take preventive steps and to jump into action as soon as you see a single mouse or rat.
Fortunately, pest control services like Richland Pest & Bee Control offer prevention plans that can nip potential rodent problems in the bud.
If rodents don’t have a ready source of food, water, and shelter, they’re likely to move on to a more hospitable location. With this in mind, you should take the following precautions:
You should also keep an eye out for any signs of a rodent infestation in your home. These include droppings, chewed holes in clothing, books, or food boxes, or scurrying noises in your walls at night. As with other common pests like cockroaches, seeing one or two rodents running around your home can often mean that dozens more are hiding elsewhere.
Once you’ve made your house less attractive to rodents through comprehensive housing pest control, you’ll want to determine where they’ve been entering.
Unfortunately, no home is entirely air-tight (and therefore rodent-proof). However, as long as you seal all openings larger than half an inch in diameter, pests will find it very hard to gain entry.
Holes near windows and doors can often be sealed with weather stripping. Meanwhile, small openings in drywall, flooring, or even your foundation can be plugged with a small piece of steel wool.
Although rodents can chew through just about anything, they don’t enjoy the sensation of the wool’s metal wires and will usually steer clear.
Cold weather is coming, and now is the time to protect your home from troublesome pests.
Luckily, Richland Pest and Bee Control can help. Our expert technicians provide a variety of effective pest prevention services, from sealing up access-points to setting mouse and rat traps.
For more tips to prevent a rodent infestation, or to schedule an appointment, contact us today!
Richland Pest & Bee Control is a family-owned pest management company serving Connecticut and Western Massachusetts for over 40 years. Known for their expertise and 5-star customer service, they offer reliable solutions for stinging insects, rodents, and other pests, ensuring homes and businesses stay pest-free.