Carpenter ants can ruin porches by excavating galleries in damp wood framing. Pavement ants can ruin porches by nesting under concrete slabs and pavers, causing them to settle and crack.
Stink bugs stay active until sustained cold shuts them down, which usually happens in October or sometimes a mild November.
If daytime temperatures are consistently reaching the mid-50s and you're starting to see insects, that is the right time to start treating. In Metro Detroit, that usually means late April or early May.
Spring rains create the standing water mosquitoes need to breed. More rain means more breeding sites, and the population surge typically arrives one to two weeks after the heaviest rainfall.
Once applied, a professional barrier treatment is effective for about 21 days. After that, the active ingredient has degraded enough that mosquito activity begins to return and it’s time to treat again.
When mosquitoes are active, it’s a good idea to have barrier treatments done every 2–3 weeks. This keeps the treatment fresh and prevents the mosquito population from rebuilding between treatments.
Mosquitoes go where the habitat supports them. So if you have more mosquitoes than your neighbor, look for standing water and denser shade and vegetation first.
It can provide attractive shelter. A woodpile gives rodents protected spaces to hide, travel, and sometimes nest.
Rodents often seek shelter as temperatures drop, and foundations tend to have nearby debris they can stay in. Garbage gives them an easy source of food while there.
Most spiders in Michigan are not dangerous to cats or dogs. The two species to watch out for are the black widow and the brown recluse, both of which are not very common in southeast Michigan.
Drag a light cloth through the edges of your yard and see if you find ticks. Also useful: pay attention to local wildlife and whether your pets come inside with ticks.
A single female tick can lay a couple thousand eggs at once, so it takes very few ticks to seed a large population in one season.
Ticks carry a surprising range of illnesses, and Lyme disease is only the best known of them. Depending on the species, a tick bite can also transmit anaplasmosis, babesiosis, ehrlichiosis, the rare but serious Powassan virus, and even set off a red-meat allergy.
When the winter is mild, more ticks survive and then they get an early start in spring where they produce more often. Ticks already have ways to survive winter and even slightly warmer-than-usual seasons greatly improve their survival odds.
Many ticks are not infected, and those that are need time to transmit disease. Even when an infection does take hold, symptoms may present as mild, delayed, or absent at first.
Rocky Mountain spotted fever (RMSF) is rare in Michigan. While national spotted fever rickettsiosis reports have grown since 2000, this trend stems from broader, less-specific testing, not a rise in confirmed RMSF.
Ticks survive Michigan winters by going dormant and sheltering under leaf litter, snow, and debris. This insulates them from the worst of the cold, and helps them live until the temperature climbs above freezing, at which point they can become active again.
A single tick can carry more than one disease-causing pathogen. That means that one bite can transmit multiple infections at the same time, giving you what is called a “co-infection.”
Yes, ticks are a risk in the suburbs just like they are in rural areas. Blacklegged ticks, which are known to carry Lyme disease, have been spreading across southeast Michigan.
Use fine-tipped tweezers to grip as close to the skin as possible. Pull straight upward with steady, even pressure.
Yes, you can catch Lyme disease from a deer tick picked up in a suburban yard. Deer and white-footed mice move freely throughout suburban lots and regularly bring deer ticks along with them.
Yes, this happens every summer. Mailboxes are dry, enclosed cavities with overhead surfaces to build on, and they go undisturbed for most of the day.
