Diamond Rings and More

Posts Tagged ‘Insects’

Stick insects have quite a few names. First of all the order to which they belong is called either Phasmatodea or Phasmida. Then they are known as stick insects in Europe and Australasia, but walking sticks or stick-bugs in America and Canada. Some also go by the name of phasmids, leaf insects and ghost insects.

Needless to say, most of them look like twigs, sticks or leaves. Most stick insects come from South East Asia, but they are abundant in many tropical climates including Australia and the southern states of America. Most of the stick insects that are kept as pets are Indian (or Laboratory) stick insects and they grow to around four inches long and live for about a year.

There are very exotic species of stick insect like the Vietnamese thorny stick insect and the pink-winged flying stick insect, but they are more difficult to look after. It is better to begin with the Indian common form. They will live fairly happily in a vivarium, which is an aquarium for reptiles and insects.

Except for providing fresh food and water from time to time and taking out old food, there is no maintenance needed for these animals. They will require a relatively warm climate but that is not difficult to arrange with a heater, a thermostat and a timer.

Food is not difficult for common stick insects, The most common foods given are privet and lettuce, but they also like ivy, oak, bramble, blueberry and raspberry. You have to put enough of these plants in the vivarium to provide cover for the residents so that they do not feel out in the open and at risk but not so much that you never get sight of them.

Make sure that there are lots of air holes in the vivarium, but for the sake of security, they ought to be covered with fly screen or netting, because these creatures can wriggle through small openings. The tanks ought to be kept at 70F during the day and 60F at night with moderate humidity. They may be permitted to forage for food at will, but be careful that the water supply is very shallow, because they been known to drop in and drown.

You will be surprised to discover that the overwhelming majority of Indian stick insects are female, but that they do not require a male to have fertile eggs. Young are capable of laying eggs after their sixth moult, all of which moults they consume. Stick insects can lay hundreds of eggs which just drop down among the leaf litter on the floor of the vivarium.

If you want to hatch them out, spray a little water on them to simulate light rain and they should hatch. If you do not want to be troubled with them, burn the contents of the tank after the last adult has passed away. You might need a permit to keep stick insects, especially in the United States..

Owen Jones, the writer of this piece writes on several subjects, but is currently involved with finding a home remededy for mosquito bites. If you would like to know more, please go to our website at Getting Rid of Mosquito Bites.

Were you aware that Eastern Equine Encephalitis can be spread to humans? It is rare, but mosquitoes can give humans EEE and at least one resident of Middleborough can corroborate it. What is more EEE is worse for humans than West Nile Virus, which is spread by the same species of mosquito in the North East of the United States.

Eastern Equine Encephalitis attacks the brain and the nervous system and frequently either kills of leaves its victim in significant trouble.

The one man who is known to have been infected with EEE in NE America in August 2010, is still in a wheel chair a year afterward and there is no foreseeable end to his pain.

The health authorities in nearby Plymouth and Bristol counties where there were also plenty of these mosquitoes (Culex pipiens) last year have advised that this could be a bad year for them too.

They warned householders to start on home defence by repairing broken and damaged fly screens now. They have also recommended cleaning up mosquitoes’ breeding grounds.

This involves up-turning any bins that could hold water for them to breed in. Do not forget that a mosquito just needs a half inch of water to lay 400 eggs. Drill holes in flower pots and long forgotten tyres so that they cannot hold water any longer.

Old tyres are cited as one of the main causes for the proliferation of mosquitoes and the spreading of new species.

The next couple of weeks are the linchpin of how many mosquitoes will be around later in the summer and autumn. The more you exterminate now, the fewer there will be to make further generations and mosquitoes may breed a new generation approximately once a month.

That is 1×400x400×400 mosquitoes each quarter for every mosquito that escapes. A great-grandmother mosquito can become responsible for 64 million offspring every quarter!

These mosquitoes (C. pipiens) breed in water, but hang out in damp, dark undergrowth, so you could spray in there as well. Some local authorities have been out spraying the parks and verges, but you can do your bit by taking control of your own micro-environment – your backyard, shed and garage.

EEE has not been seen this year in the North East so far, but West Nile Virus has been observed twice already. The weather has been ideal for mosquitoes – rain followed by warm weather.

The symptoms of West Nile and Easter Equine are comparable to those of flu. The difference is that around 1% of those with WNF might die, but a lot more with EEE will almost certainly die. Around a third will suffer permanent brain injury

People are worried by last year’s incident. For example, the authorities in Plymouth County have already received almost 10,000 requests to spray against mosquitoes. This situation can only get worse unless residents help by checking their gardens and nearby garbage ground for likely breeding sites and destroying them. But it is not easy, mosquitoes can breed in a waste potato chip packet, so refuse becomes a big topic too.

Owen Jones, the author of this piece writes on more than a few subjects, but is currently involved with how to stop mosquito bite itch. If you want to know more, please go to our web site at Getting Rid of Mosquito Bites.

You cannot tell where bed bugs are living; you cannot even guess, just by looking around you. You could be sitting in a chair in a fine hotel waiting for someone to come down or you could be having tea at a friend’s house and you are equally as likely to pick up a bed bug.

The developed Western world has not experienced this kind of situation for about sixty years. However, since 1995, bed bugs have been increasing practically uninhibited and we are approaching the conditions people were living in before the Second World War. That is a very sad state of affairs indeed.

Especially when you appreciate that before the war, you could put a bit of poison down and kill them. These days, you cannot, because some bedbugs have become resistant to a lot of the insecticides commonly available to domestic households. So, in one way we are worse off than we were 60 years ago and unless something comes to our aid, it will only get worse.

Although bedbugs wreak most mayhem in a bed, that is not normally where people get them from. They also reside in the folds of fabric in the seats of buses, trains, taxis, hotel rooms, restaurants and even airplanes. However, bedbugs are not taken home stuck to your skin like a flea or a tick.

Instead they will crawl into a hem or a pocket or under a collar, drawn by your body heat or breath and either go to sleep or lay eggs. A female can lay 300 eggs in a single day – not a great deal by insect terms, but do you want 301 bedbugs in your bedroom wardrobe by the end of next week?

I am sure that you have become aware how hard it is to totally avoid the risks of picking up bed bugs and carrying them home. Bed bugs have natural predators, but it is uncertain that you would rather have bed bugs than the insects that prey on them – cockroaches, ants, spiders and centipedes – and insecticides are not always successful.

The one thing that certainly kills them, besides being trodden on by a size ten army boot, is heat. No stages of the bedbug’s life can withstand temperatures above 45c.

This may be noteworthy, because modern washing powders are intended to get clothes clean at 30c, thus saving electricity, but they also unintentionally save the lives of the bedbugs on your clothing as well. You can make sure that your clothes are bedbug-free by washing them at 46-50c and you can kill existing bedbugs in your house by steam cleaning it, which is the professional way of getting rid of an infestation of bedbugs.

It is time for people to be aware of this fairly new threat to their well-being. The key things you can do are: acquaint yourself with what a bedbug looks like and have your clothes laundered at temperatures above 46c if you think that you may have been exposed to an infestation of bed bugs.

Owen Jones, the writer of this article, writes on many topics, but is at present involved with bed bugs extermination. If you are interested in this, please visit our website now at Picture Of Bed Bugs for further information.

There are times when it just seems that there are much more insects than previously. Maybe it is the warmer winters and wetter summers helping them breed more easily, or possibly it is because fewer people are using pesticides in their gardens.

It is fairly understandable that a lot of people do not want to use chemicals on their gardens, but not using anything at all results in a boom in the insect population.

During the last fifty or so years, people have become more and more accustomed to using chemical pesticides to poison household and backyard insect pests because they are a quicker and certain killer. So what can you do if you would like to manage the quantity of backyard insect pests, but do not want to use chemicals?

Well, you would have to go back to using natural insect pest killers, although most households have forgotten what their great-grandparents used to use to eradicate insects.

The following is a list of a few of the natural ways of killing insect pests. However, not all methods or plants will be obtainable in all countries.

Stinging nettles: if you cut down a clump of stinging nettles and immerse them in water for a week or more, chemicals will leach out of the nettles into the water. Strain the water off and spray it on your plants. It will kill or discourage a great deal of garden insects. You could also use it as a plant food, but you will have to be careful how concentrated it is.

Rotenone: is a natural insecticidal. It is manufactured from the roots of the derris plant. It kills by attacking the stomachs of insects. However, it is rather slow-acting and has to be reapplied often in order to obtain the maximum impact.

Washing Up Water: soapy water of any sort will kill green fly amongst other backyard insect pests. This is a very easy control to dispense. Simply strain your soapy water into a spray gun (like an empty window spray gun) and blast your greenfly.

Corn flour: you can sprinkle this around plants or skirting boards to kill insects. If a tomato hornworm or a cockroach eats some, the corn flour will swell up in the insect’s stomach with the bodily fluids in there and the insect will eventually explode.

Pyrethrum: will paralyze an insect, but it will also wear off, so it is frequently mixed with a poison to finish the insect off. Otherwise, you can sweep them up.

A combination of cow’s milk, flour and water can be employed as a natural insecticide, funnily enough. It is very good at killing the eggs of insects. It also destroys insects themselves by blocking their breathing holes. In other words, they asphyxiate.

Neem is a very common tree in India and has medicinal properties too as insecticidal applications. This natural insecticide repels insects by means of an active constituent that mimics an insect hormone. It makes it difficult, if not impossible, to digest food and it blocks their cycle of reproduction. It works best of all on insects that primarily eat leaves.

Owen Jones, the writer of this article, writes on many topics, but is currently concerned with Insect Removal. If you want to know more, visit our website now at Pest Management at Home.

There is a growing chance that the rooms you take in hotels will have bed bugs. I am not talking about a cheap room in a doss-house, but rooms in any hotel in the world. Expensive suites and first-class hotels are also as likely to have bed bugs as the doss-house.

This is of course very bad news for the traveller and tourist. It is ghastly enough being bitten if you are paying for a room in a hotel, but if there are bed bugs, you could end up taking them home and creating your very own infestation as well.

So, basically, you have to know how to discover whether your room has bed bugs or not and what you can do about it.

Bite marks are palpable indications, but they are not infallible because not everybody is allergic to bed bug saliva, which causes the bump and itchiness. Not only that, but some individuals do not suffer any reaction for a couple of days, so you could have been bitten in the last hotel you stayed.

If you do see bite marks, bed bug bites are usually round, red-pink marks that look like the end of the rubber on a pencil. They will also lie in a line or crooked line, but not random like mosquito bites. More like flea bites, but larger.

If lots of bed bugs bite you in one night, and that is commonplace, because when a bed bug finds a victim, it gives out pheromones to tell its friends that you are there, you may gt a rash. The rash may be substantial and deep red and may link all the patches of bites, perhaps on your chest or back.

However, if you have been bitten it is already too late. When you go into your room, take a deep sniff. This almost certainly will not help either as hotel staff know to spray air freshener in a room moments before a guest goes to look at it.

Bed bugs give off a, sickly, musty, ‘dirty’ odour, which, people say, once smelled, is never forgotten. The more bed bugs, the stronger the smell. It may take a couple of hours before the air freshener wears off and reveals the odour of bed bugs. You could attempt sniffing around the skirtings.

If this does not reveal bed bugs, place a bar of soap in a little water and lie on the bed for 30 minutes. Then, get up quickly, grab the soap and whip the bedclothes back. if you see any bed bugs, dab them up with the wet soap and you have proof to show the hotel manager.

Whatever the consequences of your due diligence, before you leave the hotel on the last day, unpack your luggage and look for bed bugs; then put all your used garments in sealable plastic bags. In that way , you reduce the likelihood of taking any on your journey onwards.

Owen Jones, the writer of this piece writes on several topics, but is currently involved with bed bug covers for mattresses. If you would like to know more, go over to our website at Bugs Infestation.