Pest Library

Large black or red-and-black ants that hollow out damp wood to nest. They do not eat it, so what you find is sawdust rather than missing wood.

Bed bugs feed on blood, hide within a few feet of where you sleep, and fit into a crack no wider than a toothpick. They do not spread disease, and they have nothing to do with how clean your home is.

A roost on your roof or tower is a federal wildlife matter, not a homeowner project. It is protected.

One egg case releases up to 40 nymphs, and a single mated female can put thousands of offspring into a building in under a year. This is the one cockroach that does not live outdoors at all, so if it is inside, it is breeding inside.

A climbing member of the weasel family. Bushy tail, sharp claws, and a buff-to-orange bib across the throat.

The burrowing yard rodent you actually see out in the open. That alone separates it from gophers and moles.

Venomous, and far less dangerous than its reputation. The red hourglass is not always an hourglass and not always complete.

Almost every termite page on the internet quotes the same annual damage figure. We went looking for where it came from and could not find a primary source, not even in the university extension publications that print it. The best-sourced estimate we did find is a 2012 review in Annual Review of Entomology by Rust and Su, which put the worldwide cost of termite control and repair near $40 billion a year, roughly half of that in the United States, with subterranean termites responsible for about 80 percent of it. That number was built backward from termiticide sales, multiplied by a repair-to-control ratio borrowed from Formosan termite work in New Orleans. Nobody has actually measured it. Treat it as an order of magnitude, not a measurement, and be skeptical of anyone who quotes you a damage total to the dollar.

Arachnids, not insects. Tick season is not summer, and most people protect themselves for the wrong half of the year.