Household Pests

Pale spider on the ceiling at 11 p.m., gone by morning. Odds are good that’s a yellow sac spider, and the reason you can’t find it in daylight is that it doesn’t live in a web. It hunts at night and spends the day zipped into a small silk pouch where a wall meets the…

The mouse that moves into your shed, garage or car in October usually isn’t a house mouse, and that’s the first thing to know about how to get rid of field mice. “Field mouse” is a loose name for any small wild rodent, but the one that comes indoors in North America is usually a…

You open the flour and something moves. Or tiny reddish-brown beetles keep turning up on the counter and the windowsill, nowhere near food. Good news first: flour beetles don’t bite, don’t carry disease and aren’t eating your house. Bad news: they’re living in a package of food somewhere, possibly not in the kitchen, and their…

You reach for the flour and the surface seems to move, or there is fine webbing across the top of the cereal. Pantry pests – the beetles, weevils, moths and booklice that get into stored food – are rarely a sign of a dirty kitchen. They usually arrive inside something you bought, in damaged packaging…

You moved a stack of firewood or tipped up a flowerpot, and there it was: a glossy black spider with a red hourglass on its belly, sitting in a messy tangle of web. Deep breath. Black widows are genuinely venomous, but bites are uncommon, the spiders are not aggressive, and a healthy adult almost never…

Twice a year, from Texas across the Gulf Coast to Florida, the air fills with lovebugs (Plecia nearctica, a small black fly with a red thorax that flies joined tail to tail). They don’t bite, they don’t sting, and they carry no disease. The trouble is mechanical: they splatter windshields, they pack into radiator grilles…

Those near-invisible white specks moving across the damp bathroom wall or clustered on the windowsill, right where the mold is, are most likely mold mites feeding on it. Wipe them off and they come back, because the mold is still there and the damp that grew it is still there. That is the whole trap:…

How to get rid of wasps depends almost entirely on where the nest is and what type you’re dealing with. An aerial nest under your eaves is a different problem from a colony tunneled into your lawn, and both are different from wasps getting in through a gap in your siding. The right approach for…

Got fruit flies from compost? The pile itself isn’t the problem. The scraps sitting on top of it are. Fruit flies from compost are almost always being produced by surface scraps, not the pile itself. Fresh food scraps left exposed broadcast fermenting volatiles that adults can detect from a surprising distance. The moment you bury…