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When cooler temperatures arrive, mice, rats, and other rodents that forage outside during spring and summer tend to head for warmer areas – like the inside of your house. Because rodents can compress their skeletons to squeeze through tiny gaps, even the smallest entry point can become a veritable rodent highway.

To safeguard your home, let’s take a look at a few tips for preventing rodent infestations.

The Importance of Prevention

While rabbits are well-known for their prolific breeding habits, rodents like mice and rats aren’t far behind. Each healthy female mouse can have five to six litters per year (averaging six to eight pups per litter). Although mice only live a couple of years, they’re fertile for the vast majority of this time.

This means that a colony of two females and one male could balloon into an unmanageable infestation of more than 100 rodents within a year. Therefore, it’s important to take preventive steps and to jump into action as soon as you see a single mouse or rat. Fortunately, pest control services like Richland Pest & Bee Control offer prevention plans that can nip potential rodent problems in the bud.

Limit Rodent Attractions

If rodents don’t have a ready source of food, water, and shelter, they’re likely to move on to a more hospitable location. With this in mind, you should take the following precautions:

• Seal all perishable, non-refrigerated items (like flour, breakfast cereal, chips, nuts, and cookies) in plastic or glass containers.
• Organize or discard any stacks of cardboard, paper, and other easily-shreddable rodent bedding material.
• Track down and repair any water leaks around your appliances. Mice can sustain themselves for quite some time on a fairly small amount of water, including the drips and spills often found around toilets, sinks, and dishwashers.

You should also keep an eye out for any signs of a rodent infestation in your home. These include droppings, chewed holes in clothing, books, or food boxes, or scurrying noises in your walls at night. As with other common pests like cockroaches, seeing one or two rodents running around your home can often mean that dozens more are hiding elsewhere.

Inspect and Seal Entry Points

Once you’ve made your house less attractive to rodents, you’ll want to determine where they’ve been entering. Unfortunately, no home is entirely air-tight (and therefore rodent-proof). However, as long as you seal all openings larger than half an inch in diameter, pests will find it very hard to gain entry.

Holes near windows and doors can often be sealed with weather stripping. Meanwhile, small openings in drywall, flooring, or even your foundation can be plugged with a small piece of steel wool. Although rodents can chew through just about anything, they don’t enjoy the sensation of the wool’s metal wires and will usually steer clear.

Prevent Rodent Infestations with Help from Richland Pest and Bee Control

Cold weather is coming, and now is the time to protect your home from troublesome pests. Luckily, Richland Pest and Bee Control can help. Our expert technicians provide a variety of effective services, from sealing up access-points to setting mouse and rat traps.

For more tips to prevent a rodent infestation, or to schedule an appointment, contact us today!