When the mercury starts to dip in autumn, this signals ants to seek out warmer places to house their colonies in winter. As expert scavengers, ants can also detect food smells from over 3 metres away. With these important resources being readily available in your home, it’s not hard to imagine why ants would want to venture inside!

How to identify ant infestation

• You’re noticing more ants out and about, especially marching along well-defined ant trails to and from their nest and food source
• You find ant hills in your garden, which look like small areas of raised dirt, with a central opening
• Fire ants can create distinctive mounds which are up to 40cm high, depending on the type of soil
• Carpenter ants leave behind piles of frass, resembling fine dirt particles, made up of wood shavings, dirt, droppings and ant body parts

Tips to keep ants away

• Keep food covered in tightly sealed containers and stored away
• Regularly clean and disinfect food preparation and dining areas including tables, benches, sinks, stoves and floors.
• Don’t forget outdoor dining areas as well
• Wipe away food spills and crumbs immediately
• Avoid leaving dirty dishes and cutlery in the sink
• Keep rubbish stored in bins with well-fitted lids
• Regularly mow your lawn
• Trim back trees and shrubs away from your home
• Dispose fallen fruit in your backyard, as well as piles of vegetation
• Use ant baits

Hungry pests are expert scavengers, possessing many finely tuned sensors which can detect food from farther away than you’d think!

For this reason, we recommend keeping your dry food items covered and stored in tightly sealed containers in your pantry. This includes pet food, chicken and bird feed.

For more perishable food, consider storing it in the freezer to avoid it spoiling in the fridge while you’re away.

Many pests are cold blooded, including spiders, mosquitoes, ants, cockroaches, flies, fleas, moths, pest bees, wasps and termites. This means that their body temperature and activity levels vary depending on their environment.

The arrival of summer will bring them out of hibernation over winter, and gives them more energy to be active, scavenge for food, seek shelter and breed.

For some pests, particularly pest bees and wasps, the longer days also give them more time to cause a nuisance in your garden.

Having successfully controlled pest outbreaks for over 35 years, our team is fully equipped with early pest detection equipment to identify the source of your infestation.

Then, we will implement a tailored pest management plan, using a range of nontoxic treatments which are safe for children, pets and the environment.

Our range of Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority approved treatments include:

• Chemical treatments such as aerosol sprays, fumigation and fogging
• Physical treatments such as traps, bait stations, netting, bird spikes

We will also make recommendations for long term pest prevention to safeguard your home against the threat of future outbreaks.

With summer being their peak season, hungry mosquitoes are often heard buzzing around looking for suitable hosts to feed off. Famous for their irritating, itchy bites, which can trigger allergies, mosquitoes move from host to host drawing blood and potentially spreading nasty diseases such as Dengue fever, Ross River virus, Yellow fever and Barmah Forest virus.

That’s why we encourage preventing skin contact with mosquitoes by wearing long sleeved clothing and applying insect repellent.

Although they’re tiny, it’s possible to stop mosquitoes from flying inside your home by:

• Installing mesh screens over your windows and doors
• Removing sources of moisture, including pet water bowls, ponds, bird baths, leaking taps and drains, and making sure that plant pots have adequate drainage

If they’re becoming a major nuisance, Allstate offers a range of professional treatments that target all stages of the mosquito life cycle, as well as fogging sprays and residual barrier sprays for ongoing protection.

While we’re busy keeping pests away from our homes, let’s not forget our furry friends! With more active fleas around in the warmer months, our pets can be silently suffering without us having a clue.

Red-brown coloured and around 2mm long, fleas can sometimes be hard to spot, but it’s important to check our pets’ fur for signs of flea infections, look out for flea eggs and droppings, and be aware of changes in pet behaviour.

You can keep your home and pets flea-free by taking the following steps:

• Managing other pests which can introduce fleas to your home, such as rodents and pest birds
• Conducting regular yard maintenance to reduce flea hiding and breeding spots, such as lawns and piles of vegetation
• Regular cleaning, especially in areas are frequented by your pets, including rugs and furniture
• Wash pet bedding using hot water
• Grooming and washing your pets
• Fitting your pet with a flea collar
• Taking your pet to your local trusted vet

For all persisting flea issues, Allstate can assist with flea control dust and insecticide treatments.

Although most spiders in Australia are harmless, the notorious venomous redback and certain species of funnel web spiders are known to strike fear in many. This is because their bites contain toxic venom which requires immediate medical attention.

The good news is, redbacks and funnel webs are not aggressive unless they are disturbed. Here’s how to identify them:

• Redback spiders are 1.5mm long and black coloured with a distinct red stripe on their upper abdomen. They create messy and irregular, but strong and sticky cobwebs
• Funnel web spiders are 1-5cm long, glossy-looking, black-brown in colour and covered with fine hairs. They build non sticky, funnel shaped webs burrows to live in, and hunt for their prey. You’ll most likely find them under rocks, or inside logs.

You can prevent spiders from visiting your home by taking the following steps:

• Identifying and covering all entry points, including vents and cover gaps underneath doors using draught excluders
• Remove clutter from your home so there are less hiding spots
• Reduce the number of insects around your home, which will attract spiders

If you’re concerned about having venomous spiders, we don’t recommend approaching them yourself. At Allstate, our technicians are professionally trained to handle all types of spiders. We offer effective spider treatments such as spider control dust and insecticide sprays to protect you and your family from venomous spiders.

With limited space to raise their young and store honey, worker bees spend around a month preparing for a swarm. The aim of the swarm is to support the current colony and allow it to continue growing.

There are 3 types of bee swarms: primary and secondary swarms, as well as absconding.

During a swarm, a significant number of bees say farewell to their hive to start a fresh colony elsewhere. In primary swarms, the resident Queen bee is escorted to a new hive with around half of the colony. A smaller secondary swarm may follow later, where one more new Queen bee will exit. If the entire colony leaves due to extreme circumstances such as disease, this is known as absconding.

Once a swarm departs the hive, it will travel to a spot that is determined to be safe and suitable as a home by scout bees. Worker bees will then begin the important job of building a brand new hive.

The most obvious way to tell if you’re about to experience a bee swarm is that you notice more bees around your home. You may even hear their distracting buzzing noises before you see them.

You’ll most likely see them buzzing between flowering plants in your garden and lingering around certain parts of your building to build their new hive. Pay attention to potential entry points inside your roof and walls as these are popular nesting sites.

If there are established beehives nearby, there is always a risk that a swarm could approach your property, so be on the look out.

Here are our simple tips to making your property less prone to bees this spring:

Remove food and water sources

Bees mainly feed on nectar and pollen, but some species will eat meat, dairy products, fungi and flower-based oils. So keep food items covered where possible, including pet water bowls.

Choose your flowering plants carefully

Bees are attracted to bright coloured blue, purple and violet flowers with a pleasant sweet scent, so having less of these around will make your garden far less appealing. They are unable to see red flowers, such as tulips, making them a better choice.

Bee deterring plants

Some plants emit an unpleasant smell for bees and can assist in keeping them away from your garden. These include mint, eucalyptus, basil, geranium, lemongrass, neem, marigold and citronella.

Ultrasonic deterrents

You can consider purchasing electronic devices which emit sound waves outside the spectrum of human hearing. Bee antennae are sensitive to these ultrasonic sound waves, which cause confusion.

Since 1986, we’ve provided reliable and effective pest control services to residential, commercial and industrial clients. Available 24/7 to all suburbs of Adelaide for urgent advice, our highly trained and fully equipped technicians can recognise and safely manage bee swarms with minimal impact on the bee population.

With payment plans available on all our services, you can have fast, yet long-lasting solutions to all bee swarms that settle on your property.

Rodent plagues have been dreaded for centuries, and these clever pests are famous for spreading diseases and contaminating clean places by carrying germs in their fur and droppings. With constantly growing teeth, they’ll happily chew through almost anything that they encounter, from electrical cables to walls, while raiding your kitchen pantry as you sleep!

Signs of a rodent infestation

• You notice them running around, especially after dark
• Dark brown to black droppings shaped like rice grains
• Scurrying, scratching and squeaking sounds above your ceiling at night
• A musty odour
• Partially eaten food and crumbs scattered around the floor
• Gnaw marks on walls, doors, timber, pipes, furniture and cables

Rodent treatment

We use physical rodent traps of different sizes, with larger ones for rats and smaller ones for mice, as well as rodenticide-laced baits for long-lasting rodent management.

Though they are more commonly seen marching in summer, ants will seek shelter in warm places such as your home to hibernate in winter. From your benchtops to your rubbish bins and toilets, ants can spread disease and contaminate food and surfaces around your home when foraging for food. They’re also known for painful bites which can trigger allergies in both pets and people alike.

Spotting an ant infestation

• You see many ants marching along well-defined trails
• Look for mounds of raised dirt and soil with an entry point to an underground ant nest in your yard
• Carpenter ants can tunnel through wooden structures, leaving signs of damage such as holes as well as discarded wood shavings on the floor
• Fire ants cause damage to plants in your garden

Ant control

At Allstate, we apply ant insecticide spray and ant control dust to affected areas, as well as chemical baits for long-term treatment.

With a diet that consists of starchy or saccharide-rich household items, silverfish are the worst houseguests you could have. From grains and cereals in your pantry to fabric items, paper, timber and upholstered furniture, silverfish can live up to six years by simply surviving on your precious belongings

Signs of a silverfish infestation

• You spot silverfish around your home, particularly at night
• You notice holes and damage to your clothes, furniture, haberdashery and paper-based products
• Dark, round, peppercorn-like droppings
• Moulted skins

Silverfish control

Our pest technicians will use pesticide sprays and fumigation for severe outbreaks , and apply control dust in hard to reach spaces such as wall cavities to effectively manage a silverfish problem.

As pests can be a nuisance all year round, there’s sometimes no way to escape an outbreak, even in the depths of winter. However, Allstate is always here to help, no matter the season.

Since 1986, we’ve grown to become one of Adelaide’s largest locally-operated pest control providers.

Available 24/7 for urgent advice, we offer comprehensive pest assessments and innovative solutions for infestations of all sizes in commercial, residential and industrial settings. All our services are covered by competitive warranties and don’t forget to ask us about finance options.

With an emphasis on using treatments that are non-toxic to children, pets and the environment, we’ll safeguard your home from pests throughout winter and beyond.