Pest control companies in the Ozarks staying busy despite colder weather

SPRINGFIELD, Mo. (KY3) - The Ozarks put up with a hard freeze on October 30 when lows dropped back into the lower to middle 20s. With temperatures that cold, you’ve probably heard people say it will kill off their most despised bug or pest until we warm up again.

Experts like Ivan Eftink, owner of Bug Zero in Springfield, have bad news for those people.

“The first hard freeze will slow a lot of bugs down, and you’ll stop having a lot of mosquitoes for the season,” Eftink said. “There’s a lot of other bugs, though. Over the weekend, I noticed quite a few flies on the outside of my garage at home. We’ve seen ants crawling on the snow when the sun comes out during the winter. That’s on top of some pests that come from deeper in your insulation and crawl space.”

Eftink and other pest specialists will have their employees staying busy with calls for several pests through the winter months. Field crickets, cave crickets, house mice, German cockroaches, and brown recluse silverfish are just some of the pests known to stay active throughout the year across the Ozarks. With more holiday gatherings lining up, Eftink wants people to be mindful about what they bring into the house.

“Anytime you’re bringing quantities of merchandise, produce, food, or anything else into your home, there’s the potential for hitchhikers,” Eftink says. “A German cockroach could hitchhike right on your food packaging, or bedbugs could be lurking in any secondhand luggage or bedding that someone might pick up.”

In those instances, the experts say to avoid buying secondhand furniture to keep unwanted bugs or pests from entering your home. Any holiday gatherings with food? The consensus says not to leave the food out for too long and to store your leftovers in sealed containers or packaging high up where bugs can’t get to them.

If some pests are already inside your home, you can take care of a small number of bugs with a vacuum cleaner. If pests keep showing up or if the problem gets beyond your control, Eftink says don’t hesitate to call the professionals, even in the middle of winter.

“In the better part of winter, we taper off the exterior treatments,” Eftink says. “While we won’t run the gas-powered, high-volume exterior perimeter treatments, we’ll still carry equipment for detailed exterior work. It might look a little silly to see our guys out there on a cold winter day applying product to the exterior, but the products remain effective for 30, 60, even 90 days in many cases.”

The same goes for interior treatments. As for what homeowners can do in terms of prevention, Eftink says it all starts with cutting off access from the outside.

“Physical exclusion is a good thing,” Eftink says. “Some silicone caulk around the entry points into your home, your natural gas line, your air conditioning, there are usually some gaps around there that you can caulk and seal off. A few other ways include having a good door sweep or weatherstrip around your door and caulking the window frames from outside.”

Even in the middle of the coming winter, homeowners can still reach out to professionals and take steps to keep unwanted guests out of their homes and the warmth inside.

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