0800 019 8382 or 0161 930 8814

Pest Control Services In Your Area – Harrier Pest Control deal with all pests 7 days per week and offer a fixed price on wasps nests for 2010 of just £32.00 except for postcode areas CH,CW and L where we charge £44.50 due to increased time and distance. These are guaranteed fixed prices 7 days per week.

During 2010 Harrier Pest Prevention will be increasing their area of operation and including a new service of bee swarm removal where we will make every endeavour to rehome the bees with a beekeeper rather than destroy them. As this makes quite an interruption in our day we charge £75 for this service.

Harrier Pest Control deal with all pests and a complete list of our area of operation and pests dealt with is below.

Rats, Mice, Bed Bugs, Bed Bug Bites, Ants, Wasps, Red Spider Mite, Squirrels, Beetles, Pigeons, Cluster Fly, Carpet Beetles, Biting Insects, Bedbugs, Bed Bug Rash, Mattress Bugs, Hotel Bugs, Wasps Nests, Birds, Moles, Flies, Starlings, Fur Beetles, Silverfish, Spider Beetles, Cat Fleas, Flea Bites, Cockroaches, Biscuit Beetles, Cluster Flies, Red Ants, Wasp’s Nests, Spiders, Magpies, Fleas, Bedbugs, Wasps’ Nests, Rat traps,
pest stop, Mouse repeller, rat killer, rat poison, mouse traps, rat repeller
Birds, Insects, Rodents in the following areas:

Pest Control Services In Your Area is a post from: Manchester & Trafford Pest Control

Squirrels in the loft?

A word of caution, damage caused by squirrels to electricity cables and water pipes with the resultant risk of fire and flooding is unlikely to be covered by your insurance policy as most insurance companies invalidate vermin damage.

Pest Control Squirrels in Manchester Lancashire and Cheshire – The grey squirrel population in  North West England has rocketed over the last twenty years to the extent that they are now a major pest species.
The grey squirrels which we see in our parks and gardens (Sciurus carolinensis) are not native to Britain, having been imported here less than 200 years ago from America.
Like many members of the family Sciuridae, the Grey Squirrel is a scatter-hoarder; it hoards food in numerous small caches for subsequent recovery. Some hoards, especially those made near the site of a sudden surplus of food.
Other caches are more permanent and are not retrieved until months later. It has been observed that each squirrel makes several thousand caches each season. The squirrels have very good spatial memory for the locations of these caches, and use distant and nearby landmarks to retrieve them. Smell is used once the squirrel is within a few centimetres of the cache.
The nest of the grey squirrel is called a dray (or drey) and it is usual for the female to have two litters per year, with two to four babies each.
They are minor pests in the garden, rooting up bulbs and stealing food intended for birds but can become major pests when they come into our houses.
It is increasingly common for pest controllers to attend homes where a nest has been constructed in a loft or attic space.
Squirrels are true rodents and as such have teeth which never stop growing; the word rodent coming from the Latin ‘rodere’ meaning ‘to gnaw’ and this they do very well indeed.
It is rare to enter an attic space where a dray has been constructed and find that they have not damaged electrical wiring, indeed it is estimated that up to 40% percent of fires without an obvious cause cause may be started by rodents damaging wiring.
Unfortunately they can also chew through water-pipes, especially with the recent trend towards plastic piping.
As if that wasn’t enough, many household insurance policies specifically exclude damage caused by rodents so if a squirrel floods your home by chewing through a pipe in the attic you may find yourself without cover.
Removing squirrels requires professional help, not least in as much as the law regarding squirrels restricts your options. You cannot simply buy a packet of rat poison from your local store and deal with them that way as you would be committing a criminal offence.
Furthermore you cannot trap them and release them some distance away, not only would removing a squirrel from the area of its food caches would probably condemn it to death by starvation, it is also a criminal offence under the Wildlife & Countryside Act 1981 which makes it illegal to release a grey squirrel in Britain.
That pertains also to rescuing, rehabilitating and releasing injured squirrels.
In the majority cases trapping is the the only option and this must be done in a specific manner with routine, regular inspections of the traps.
Trapped squirrels should be then despatched humanely.
If you have a squirrel infestation in Lancashire, Cheshire or Manchester telephone Harrier Pest Prevention on 0800 019 8382 or 0161 930 8814

Pest Control Squirrels in Manchester Lancashire and Cheshire is a post from: Manchester & Trafford Pest Control

Free Phone 0800 019 8382

Pest Control Wasp or Bee?

Pest Control Wasp or Bee? – as a pest controller covering Manchester, Cheshire and Lancashire it has become apparent that there is a great deal of confusion, especially in the under forties between wasps and bees and even between honeybees and bumblebees.

Perhaps in these heath and safety obsessed days schools no longer have the summertime nature rambles of my youth and that is a great pity.

At a distance it is possible to the untrained eye to confuse wasps and honeybees but bumblebees should never be in doubt.

This One's A Wasp

A wasp is any insect of the order Hymenoptera and suborder Apocrita that is neither a bee nor ant but in terms of common understanding we are dealing in North West Britain with just three species which we term wasps, The Common Wasp (Vespula vulgaris), The German Wasp (Vespula germanica) and the relative newcomer termed the ‘Euro Wasp’ (Dolichovespula media).

The biology of wasps and bees is very different.

In the late autumn a wasps’ nest dies out completely and is never re-used. The workers and males die but the newly produced queens hibernate for the winter before waking in the spring to start nest building.

At the first sign of warmer weather the young queens emerge from hibernation and commence nest building, mixing rotten wood with saliva to make ‘wasp paper’ with which to construct the nest.

She will lay 15 – 20 eggs in cells inside the nest and tend these until the first workers emerge to take over the nest building process.

An Average Wasps' Nest

Any reports of wasps’ nests prior to June, and certainly any in late April or May will always turn out to be a bee species of which there are many.

Wasp nest building continues throughout the summer and in the autumn the nest produces immature queens and males which then mate. A single wasps’ nest may produce over 2000 new queens.

This is the one that makes the honey

The bee which makes the honey unsurprisingly is the honeybee (Apis mellifera) but a staggering number of people confuse the honeybee with the bumblebee (Bombus spp.)

The honeybee has an altogether different lifecycle to the wasp, the entire colony surviving the winter, and hence are seen much earlier in the year.

A feature of the honeybee is the way in which new colonies are formed. In late spring and throughout the summer the colony will produce new queens which split or ‘bud’ from the old colony taking several thousand worker bees with them; these are called swarms and can actually be heard in flight.

A honeybee swarm Manchester 2007

This causes alarm in many people who will then ring a pest control company and declare that a ‘wasps’ nest’ has just arrived.

Clearly we know immediately that we are dealing with a bee swarm and can often point them in the direction of a beekeeper who may be able to remove the swarm unharmed.

Contrary to urban myth, and indeed the web sites of many local councils, honeybees are not a protected species in Britain and there are circumstances where there is no alternative other than to destroy a colony.

Frequently they establish a colony or ‘hive’ in a chimney stack and where this is venting a gas fire this is clearly dangerous and it is often necessary to destroy the colony.

After destroying the colony the owner of the property has a legal and moral duty to have any honeycomb removed from the stack as if it is left in place it will be robbed out by wild or commercial hive bees, resulting in the death of those colonies.

The Bumblbee Bombus terrestris - Male

A responsible pest controller will not destroy a colony unless arrangements to remove the honeycomb are in place.

The bumblebee has a lifecycle similar to a wasp in that only the new Queens survive the winter and start new nests in spring. A bumblebees’ nest is an insignificant affair, now where near as intricate as a wasps’ nest and rarely contains more than 300 workers at most whereas a honeybee colony or wasps’ nest may have upwards of ten thousand inhabitants.

Another common myth is that bees can only sting once and whilst this is true of the honeybee, the bumblebee like a wasp, can sting multiple times.

Bumblebees are however extremely placid and will only ever sting as a last resort and therefore it should rarely be necessary to destroy a bumblebee nest.

That concludes this article entitled – Pest Control Wasp or Bee?

Pest Control Wasp or Bee? is a post from: Manchester & Trafford Pest Control

How Much Does a Pest Control Company Cost?

Welcome to Harrier Pest Prevention dealing with all types of pest control in Manchester, Lancashire and Cheshire. We are available to help seven days per week on 0800 019 8382 or 01257 230637.

How Much Does a Pest Control Company Cost? – That’s a very difficult question to consider. It’s a little bit like ringing a mechanic and asking him how much to fix your car without being able to see it and diagnose the problem, virtually impossible to do.

Some jobs are pretty straightforward and here at Harrier Pest Prevention we are happy to give a fixed price on wasps’ nests but virtually every other pest problem will require a no obligation, free of charge site visit.

I would indeed be wary of any pest control company that are prepared to give prices without a site survey as this may indicate that they are not carrying out correct risk-assessments and are not mindful of the safety of you, your children and your pets.

For your no obligation site visit in Lancashire, Cheshire or Greater Manchester contact Harrier Pest Prevention or phone 0800 019 8382.

How Much Does a Pest Control Company Cost is a post from: Manchester & Trafford Pest Control