Occasional Invaders in Central Florida Homes
Occasional invaders are the pests that do not live in your house and do not want to. They come in when the weather pushes them: a week of afternoon storms, a sudden dry spell, or a landscape change next door. In Orlando that means the heaviest waves come with the summer rains and again during a hard dry stretch, when everything in the mulch goes looking for moisture and finds your slab.
Because they are pushed in from outside, the fix is outside. We treat the perimeter, the exposed surfaces they cross, and the harbourage they came from: mulch beds against the foundation, leaf litter, pine straw, landscape timbers, the sprinkler-soaked side of the house, garage door thresholds, weep holes and lanai screen frames. Interior treatment is a mop-up, not the answer.
Common occasional invaders in the Orlando area
The occasional invaders we actually see in Central Florida homes:
- Silverfish and firebrats
- Millipedes, especially in migrations after heavy rain
- Springtails
- Pillbugs and sowbugs
- Earwigs
- House and field crickets
- Centipedes, including the Florida blue centipede
- Ground and darkling beetles
- Southern stink bugs and leaf-footed bugs
- Assassin bugs, including the kissing bug
Boxelder bugs, clover mites, kudzu bugs and camel crickets belong to other parts of the country. If somebody sold you a Florida treatment plan built around those, they were reading a script.
What keeps them out
Exclusion does most of the work. Replace worn door sweeps, especially on the garage. Caulk around window frames, hose bibs and utility penetrations. Pull mulch and river rock back a few inches from the stem wall so there is a dry band around the house. Fix the irrigation head that soaks one corner of the foundation every morning. Move firewood and stored pavers off the wall. Switch exterior lights at the doors and lanai to warm or amber, because a lot of what gets in was drawn to the light first.
Indoors, silverfish and firebrats are a humidity problem. A dehumidifier in a closed-up laundry room or a bathroom vent fan that actually vents outside will do more than any spray.
A word on kissing bugs
Kissing bugs, which are a type of assassin bug, are present in Florida and can carry the parasite that causes Chagas disease. The risk of transmission in the United States is low, but it is not zero, and the bugs are real. They are attracted to porch lights, and they get in around doors and windows and through torn lanai screening.
If you find one, do not crush it against your skin. Contain it and let us identify it, because most of what gets sent to us as a kissing bug turns out to be a harmless leaf-footed bug or a western conifer seed bug. Sealing gaps and changing the porch lighting is the practical prevention.
Occasional invaders will not eat your house the way termites do, but a wave of them after a week of Central Florida rain can take over a garage, a lanai and every ground-floor door frame in a couple of days. Envirosafe Pest Control of Orlando has spent over 30 years keeping them outside where they belong, using organic and low-impact treatments and, more importantly, fixing the conditions that let them in. The treatment is the quick part. The door sweep, the mulch line and the irrigation head are what make it last.
Satisfaction Guaranteed
If the real problem at your house is moisture or a gap rather than an insect, we will tell you that, even when the fix is not something we sell.
