Nuisance Insects Survive A Winter

Its winter, don’t all the bugs die in winter?

We hear this question A LOT in our industry. The short answer is no, they don’t all die. If they all died in the cold weather, how could they just magically appear in the spring? Bugs don’t have calendars! Some of them must have survived in order to reproduce in the spring? Haven’t you ever seen a spider in the winter? I just killed one climbing down from my kitchen exhaust fan last night as a fact (actually my wife did). 

There’s no doubt that cold weather impacts the number and visibility of bugs in the winter. During the late fall many insects seek warmth and shelter in order to survive for the spring. If you have ants in the fall and you don’t address them, they will hunker down and hide in warm pockets of insulation in attics or wall voids. They can survive by slowly internally digesting saccharin’s their bodies stored during the spring. We start getting calls for carpenter ants around mid-March but pavement ants (they tiny brown or black ants) we can see on and off all winter long in the right circumstances.

The attic is almost always the key. As we all know, heat rises. Many homes in the New England area are not properly insulated per the federal Dept. of Energy standards. If you wonder if your home is properly insulated, look outside after a decent snowfall. Snow is a great insulator, believe it or not. Homes with proper insulation will have a thick, even coating of snow because the attic insulation trapped the heat inside the home. Homes with improper amounts of insulation will often show much less snow or even bare shingles. The heat rises straight into the attic and creates a great environment for critters such as carpet beetles, mice, western conifer seed bugs, stink bugs, silverfish, spiders of all kinds, etc. Then these critters reproduce and find their way down into your living space in search of food. Hence the need for year round inspections and service. I rest my case.