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Pest control in the shop

Darren Wright

Darren Wright

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Location
Springfield, Missouri
Last summer I had a really bad problem with brown recluses in my shop. Two years before that it was a mouse/rat problem. I go through a period in early summer I go out daily and have spider webs strung ceiling to floor covering every square inch of my shop, it's a big egg incubator at that time.

I've learned to deal with the rats by keeping the decon bait blocks out. That spring when I first did it I must have fished at least 100 dead rats/mice out of my pool and fish pond from ones that were drinking themselves to death from the decon. Seemed a bit cruel, but also didn't realize the scale of the problem I had as I rarely saw one.

To deal with the normal spiders I've started spraying the shop in early summer and again in the fall.

For the brown recluses, the spraying doesn't really work as they don't drag their bodies like other spiders, but I've found they don't like moth balls. I have some 2 oz plastic cups that I put in the bottoms of every cabinet and a few under them, then put a couple of moth balls in every cup. In combination I put out some glue traps as they'll usually leave the cabinets and look for food. It usually takes a bug getting stuck on one to start drawing them in, then they get stuck and others come to feed on them and they get stuck. I can usually get a few months out of the glue traps by flipping them over as they get full. This one had probably 50 - 60 spiders in it.
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I've started to rid my shop of cardboard boxes, which is usually where I find the brown recluses, and frequently vacuum the floors to keep dead bugs out (to have less food for them). The moth balls do work well, not a spider in any cabinet once I put them in there, but can't stand the smell of the shop for a while and can't spend time in there without having the doors open.

Any solutions that work for you for pest control?
 
I hear you on the pests. For the past few weeks the missus has been putting unshelled peanuts on the deck for the "cute" squirrels and I scolded her about drawing those tree rats and other varmits close to the house. Sure enough, yesterday when I pulled the cover off the grill there was a big old norway rat sitting on the side burner eating peanuts. The whole inside of the grill was covered in peanut shells. She decided to do the ribs in the oven;) One day last week my ring door camera alerted at 1am and it turned out to be another big rat crawling around the front porch. I'm sure the bird feeders and garden surplus is keeping a colony of them going strong back in the woods. I try to avoid the bait blocks because of the potential impact it might have on the food chain. IIRC I caught 4 rats in one day last year with traps set on the back patio near the bird feeders. Put out the traps again yesterday, but haven't had any luck yet. I use an upside down concrete mixing trough with a couple of small holes drilled in the sides to cover the traps and keep pets out. Seems to work well.

Can't help you with the recluse spiders. When we were out in Oklahoma recently my son-in-law was always on the look out for them because his shop had a lot of places for them to live...and he had a bunch. He used a leaf blower plus his compressor to blow out all the cubbys and other hiding spots every couple of days, which seemed to help. The sticky traps seem like a good idea. Can you just seal your shop up and touch off a couple of bug bombs?
 
Unfortunately no, the bug bombs will only affect those that are out and about, typically I find them under or in a box, under or behind cabinets when I move them. I've killed three this past weekend hiding in the little organizer drawers I'm trying to move over to the HF boxes. The glue traps seem to work the best once I ran them out of the cabinets with the moth balls. Then you take away all the other dead bugs around the shop or put them where other bugs tend to get in around some light source usually. I even took a few dead moths and put them on the glue trap in the middle to lure the spiders in, which seemed to help. They were empty until I noticed other bugs getting stuck on them.

Right now it's not a bad problem, just looking for things I can do that maybe can deter them from sticking around that don't smell as bad as the moth balls do. I've read about others using hedge apples and crab apples to deter/kill them, so may try some of those when I can find some.

For the house and around our door ways I've been using the Ortho Home Defense Max and since spraying the baseboards I've hardly seen a spider in 6 months now. It's supposed to be a 12 month treatment. I read it even works for scorpions @Vaughn McMillan. :) It's active ingredient is bifenthrin, which is pretty much odorless.
 
I feel Ted's pain regarding a wife who wants to feed critters. Sometimes I think I married Ellie Mae Clampett, lol. She started feeding the birds when we first moved here. It started out as mostly doves with some songbirds mixed in. Now that the pigeons have found the place, they also show up by the dozens. She's going through 40 to 50 pounds of bird seed weekly. She doesn't share my dislike of the ground squirrels that have taken up residence under our garden shed. She even has a spider catcher so that when she finds one in the house she can release it outdoors. And now she's unhappy that I (and the neighbors, via me) have told her to stop feeding the skunk that found the mealworms she puts out for the roadrunners. The only critter she's happy to kill are the scorpions and the occasional black widow. We haven't seen any brown recluses here, knock on wood. I do spray Ortho Home Defense Max at all of the door thresholds in the house, and spray the yard and sides of the house with Cyfluthrin, which is what several exterminators have recommended. (It's what they use.) In typical Albuquerque fashion, we have tons of cockroaches outside of the house, and every time I spray we find tons of dead ones all over the yard and patio. Insecticides don't affect scorpions much because they don't drag their bodies on the ground, so they don't pick up the poison, but the sprays kill the food that scorpions eat (like cockroaches), so by reducing the food supply, I can indirectly reduce the number of scorpions. It seems to be working. We're only at about 20 for the year so far, whereas previous years we were in the 50 - 60 range by this time of year. (It's been decreasing slowly for the past couple of years.)
 
We have quarterly pest control treatments on our home. During the Spring treatment, the technician sprays the baseboards of my shop. I rarely see an unwanted critter in my shop, unless you count lizards, but they're welcome to stay. As to rats and mice, one or two of our cats make a pass-through inside my shop occasionally, so no problem there.
 
Ortho Home Defense is good stuff. I use it and Sevin spray around here. I don't use much of anything, though. I have way too many lizards and toads around to want to spray much. Haven't seen a black widow here though that's probably because they hide from me. Brown recluses the same way. I do have a lot of wood spiders. Cool critters. Eat a lot of little nuisance bugs. When I see a scorpion it dies. Hard and dramatic. Special effects folks for movies would be proud to watch me in action. Rats and mice in my shop used to be a problem until I started putting a bit of fox urine around. Seems to take care of them fine. I also put a little on Belinda's car tires to keep them out from under the hood to chew wires. It also keeps the grackles from roosting on her car in parking lots and crapping on it.
 
My shop sits at the edge of the woods and under a couple of big trees... we have a family of squirrels somewhere in the woods that Dianne feeds and keep birdseed and suet feeders out for the birds... some years back had a problem with the critters wanting to use my lathe and little band saw for acorn storage.... a big black snake took up residence under the shop and the critters moved on. I do get a few bugs in the shop, but haven't seen much in the way of spiders... don't know if we have the brown recluse in TN or not... haven't seen a black widow since leaving TX... My biggest problem is red wasps and hornets... a few years back I had a paper hornets nest under the eves of my little shed off the porch and one under the barbed wire cactus hanging on the end of the shop... that one was about the size of a cantaloupe.... my wood is stored at the end of the shop, so it had to go - they're not friendly.... I had to walk past the one on the little shed off the porch and a couple let me know that didn't appreciate that.... I waited till dark and used a can of wasp spray on both nests, then the high pressure hose... they left.... I think I have a red wasp nest in the walls of my shop, mostly they don't bother me, but don't really like them. My shop is a tin building with press board on the inside and no insulation, so there's space between the outer and inner walls... plus the roof is corrugated and lays on the headers, so there's spaces there for both ventilation and entry for bugs.
The most annoying are the carpenter bees... they will fly in through the open door and buzz the lights... just plain annoying.
 
I have spiders everywhere, and nothing seems to get rid of them. Spraying with a peppermint oil mixture helps, but only lasts a few days, Makes the place smell nice, though...

The big problem right now is yellowjackets. We've had four nests within the past three weeks. Three of them were accessible at night, and I used Sevin® dust to eradicate them. The fourth nest was in some hedge where I couldn't get to them, but they took offense whenever anyone/anything got close, so I ended up calling in a pro. He suited up and crawled into the nest area, then spent quite a while accessing the in-ground nest and hitting it with a liquid poison followed by a liberal Sevin® dusting. He did give me some of his 'pro' Sevin® dust. His is 10% strength. The 'consumer' grade is only 5%.
 
Jim DeLaney said:
The big problem right now is yellowjackets. We've had four nests within the past three weeks. Three of them were accessible at night, and I used Sevin® dust to eradicate them. The fourth nest was in some hedge where I couldn't get to them, but they took offense whenever anyone/anything got close, so I ended up calling in a pro. He suited up and crawled into the nest area, then spent quite a while accessing the in-ground nest and hitting it with a liquid poison followed by a liberal Sevin® dusting. He did give me some of his 'pro' Sevin® dust. His is 10% strength. The 'consumer' grade is only 5%.
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I had a nest in the ground up on the slope right behind the house... I have to mow that with a push mower.... they didn't like the mower running over the opening... and they let me know it..... I poured about 1/2 gallon of gasoline down the hole and didn't have anymore problems with them. Fortunately I'm not allergic to wasp and hornet stings, but they hurt like hades.
 
Chuck Ellis said:
I had a nest in the ground up on the slope right behind the house... I have to mow that with a push mower.... they didn't like the mower running over the opening... and they let me know it..... I poured about 1/2 gallon of gasoline down the hole and didn't have anymore problems with them. Fortunately I'm not allergic to wasp and hornet stings, but they hurt like hades.
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A bit of Sevin dust puffed into those holes works wonders for reducing their population to zero.
 
Darren, I bused to use the Ortho Home defense (still do for certain uses) but we had something it didn't eliminate. I no longer remember what it was, but i searched for an alternative and came up with a product called Suspend SC made by Bayer. This stuff is really goo. It's a cosentrate you mix and srpay wth a tank type sprayer, and i treat my shop (and basement) once a year. Spraying the ceiling corners, wall corners, and the floor around the perimeter keeps all the spiders out and all the other invaders as well. Actually, it doesn't keep them out...just kills them when they come in; so you're always sweeping them up. Even the houseflies meet a pretty quick end. But to me the best thing is no cobwebs to clean out.
 
Well, you did good work fighting with those rats and mice. Iwe can see the periodical growth of the population, and you cannot solve the issue only by using different insecticides and sprays.
 
Occasionally I will have a spider in my shop but not that big of a problem. I figure it is because the giant cockroaches that seem to find their way into my shop must feed on the spiders. The spiders I do find seem to build near the windows and at the French doors on the front of my shop. I guess they like working in the light.

Around here we have cockroaches. They live in the mulch around the shrubbery and in the flower beds. They are so big I have tried to saddle them and use them for transportation but they are untamable.

I find these monsters in my drawers in the shop. Not in every drawer but in drawers with my buffing wheels, compounds and etc. Etc. covers just about every other drawer. Nothing I hate more than being surprised by a giant cockroach when I take something from a drawer and it scurries into the nether reaches of my cabinets.

I tried cockroach and ant powder. It does seem to work but it gets messy in the drawers because the cockroaches track it everywhere and I end up vacuuming it up. I can't imagine that it is good for us to breathe. It is basically just boric acid.

What I started doing was clean up the shop and put away my tools. I clean and cover all the machinery with plastic tarps. I open up the drawers a few inches and open the cabinet doors. Then I set off two bug bombs; one in the shop proper and one in the garage section of my shop where I store my wood. I let the fumes permeate the shop for a few days; usually a week while we are at the beach. Most of the fumes will dissipate in a week.

When I go back in the shop I open the windows and turn on the fans. I start vacuuming up the dead. I am always amazed at how many dead roaches I find. There are no funerals just disgust. I am mostly disgusted because I know I will have to do it all again in a few months.
 
I don't seem to have any problems with roaches, even though my shop sits in the edge of the woods on my lot... there's so much dust in my shop the insects mostly stay away so they don't breathe it in... I do have red wasps in the walls where the corrugated tin covers the wall studs... occasionally will get one that gets lost on his exit.... get a lot of carpenter bees buzzing around looking for a place to bore a nest... they usually don't stay long.

A few years back had some problems with critters bringing in their winter storage and hiding acorns and nuts in my lathe head stock and my little Ryobi table top saw, but a black snake moved in under the shop and I think he/she solved that problem.... also had a rat snake come into the shop... think he might have been short sighted as he/she climbed the window facing to check the temperature on the thermometer hanging at the top of the window.
 
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