Ticks and fleas dot the walls of one East Orlando apartment Carlos Velez inspects. He lifts the mattress and finds dozens of them. They bounce about him, biting his legs and arms as he baits the home. This is one of the worst cases of infestation he has ever encountered.
As one of Falcon Termite and Pest Control Inc.’s eastside pest specialists, he sees about 180 customers a month; most of them are residential, which can be worse than his commercial customers. Last Friday he made a return visit to an East Orlando restaurant that had a German roach infestation.
The cockroaches were likely brought in with packages from the food distributor, which Velez said is generally the way most restaurants, and even residences, become home to these pests. “All you need is one of them to have a problem because they multiply so quickly,” he said. “If you go to an infested restaurant, you can end up taking them home with you.”
He pulled out coolers and other equipment to find a few roaches scattering across the wall. A few months ago he would have found hundreds of them there, feeding on discarded food, but he has been treating the problem regularly.
The infestation should soon clear up completely. Not all people are as aggressive when it comes to pest problems. Falcon Supervisor Scott Ponder said they have treated restaurants that had maggots living where the menus are kept and found dead rodents underneath equipment in the kitchens. “You never know what you’re going to find when you are called out for a job.
There are some places we are surprised are still open,” said the East Orlando native. “We have even dropped clients if they keep the place filthy after we tell them to clean, or leave the dead roaches around. It gives us a bad reputation.” Velez has found homes where food was caked on counter-tops and scattered about the floor.
Roaches tend to hide when they sense humans, but some places have so many they run rampant. He remembers one home where roaches filled the cabinets of the kitchen. “It surprises me that people can be so passive because of how sick these pests can make them and their kids. Most people in my area (East Orlando) are more aggressive,” he said.
Some consider pest control a dirty job because they deal with creepy, crawly critters, but Allen Fugler, executive vice president of the Florida Pest Management Association, said the job also requires specialists to crawl under homes to reach termites or into dusty attics for problems with animals like bats. “You literally get dirty in this job.
The average inspector turns up a few surprises every now and then. You go in armed with a pen and a flashlight and encounter some surprise guests that you have to deal with,” he said. The pests themselves are filthy, leaving droppings in the home or business, and carrying diseases. Fugler said rodents generally are the dirtiest pests.
These mostly blind animals use the wall as a guide when scurrying about, leaving a trail of grease from their fur and excrement to retrace their steps after raiding the food pantry. “These pests can be very gross and they can make you pretty sick because they are big carriers of disease,” Fugler said. Cockroaches also carry a number of diseases in their regularly shed exoskeleton, including salmonella.
Ticks and fleas transmit disease by biting a person after feeding from an infected animal. An area does not have to be dirty in order to attract pests. Geographical location (living near a slow-moving body of water can attract pests like mosquitoes), available harborage near the home (an uncovered stack of wood or cardboard boxes attract pests like cockroaches and termites), and available food sources (a dirty trash can or an unsealed food container attracts all sorts of pests) can all mean an infestation.
“It is a popular misconception that a place has to be ‘dirty’ to attract pests,” Fugler said. “Pest control touches everyone’s lives.” Especially in Florida, which, because of its warm climate, hosts 20 percent of all pest-control companies nationwide. Velez said he has seen an increasing bed-bug problem.
The infested mattresses he finds do not always belong to an unkempt person. In fact, these critters are largely transported into the home after a stay in an infested hotel room which is why Velez recommends against keeping suitcases along hotel walls where the bugs like to live, or they may jump into your bag and go home with you.
Many people do not realize they have a bed-bug problem. A good indicator are small dots on the bed sheets. Bed bugs feed on human blood through the sheets so the dots are actually small spots of blood. “People see this but they have no idea what it is or that it could be a problem,” he said. Ponder said pest control can be a very challenging and satisfying career, but you have to get past the phobia most people have concerning bugs.
“I can see why so many people are afraid of them, but they never bothered me,” he said, lifting the infested restaurant’s wall clock where he expected a parade of cockroaches. “They are not going to hurt you, but they will get on you. Bed bugs, spiders, fleas, ticks are all going to get on you at some point. If you are afraid of that, you are in the wrong job.”
