Pest Control

Ants are one of the biggest nuisance pests found in Pennsylvania.  They can generate feelings of frustration, embarrassment, and even fear.  The odorous house ant, in particular, has a tremendous ability to bounce back after treatments.  Just when you think they are gone, they come back!  The house ant has a very complex social structure with multiple queens.  Single colonies can actually be part of a larger group of colonies, sometimes spanning multiple properties, all working together to assure the survival of the whole.  This is why DIY treatments for house ants are almost always unsuccessful and can, in fact, make the problem worse by splitting single colonies apart into multiples through a phenomenon known as “colony budding”.    

Ticks and mosquitoes can wreak havoc on your back yard experience, literally sucking the enjoyment out of your summer!  They are also vectors of diseases like lyme disease and west nile virus, which has recently been confirmed in our area.  Most important to the control of mosquitoes on your property is the identification and elimination of standing water, which is essential to their life cycle.  This step is often overlooked by poorly trained mosquito service providers.  You would be surprised how many mosquitoes can result from just a few ounces of standing water!  While misting or fogging the adult ticks and mosquitoes and the areas where they harbor is an important step in the treatment process, true success comes from the breaking of the life cycles of these pests.   

While generally considered beneficial creatures because they eat other insects, no occasional invader can create a fear response quite like a spider inside your home or business!  Spider webs also attract dirt and pollen from the air, making your home, business and surrounding landscape appear to be dirty or unsightly.  Spiders are not necessarily light attracted, but they know that flying insects are, which is why you will so often find them collected around the well lit areas of your property.  As the warm weather cools in the fall, many spider species will seek warmer accommodations, looking to over-winter or create a permanent residence inside your home or business.  While all spiders inject venom into their prey, very few spiders in Pennsylvania are actually hazardous to people.  The most hazardous, the brown recluse, is not native to our area, but is often shipped in from our southern neighbors, and isolated instances of indoor populations of the brown recluse spider have been found in South Central PA

The presence of a wasp, hornet, or yellow jacket nest on your property can be one of the most hazardous pest situations you may encounter.  While the workers from these nests are foraging for food, they are largely non-threatening and, in fact, are beneficial pollinators.  It is when you approach the colony itself, either knowingly or unknowingly, that these insects can become very threatening.  They communicate the presence of a threat with one another using pheromones, and once the alarm is sounded, will attack a perceived enemy in numbers, each wasp capable of stinging multiple times.  All stings include the injection of venom, and reactions to a single sting can range from mild discomfort and itch to anaphylactic shock and death for those who are most allergic to the venom.  

Discovering the presence of bed bugs in your home or business elicits perhaps the strongest of all pest related emotional responses.  Not only are they a challenging pest to eliminate (nearly impossible for the DIY Pesters), but the psychological impact of living with an insect that feeds on you in your sleep can be devastating, and sometimes takes a very long time to get over.  At Keystone Pest Solutions, we understand bed bugs, their biology and behaviors, and the impact they have on our clients.  We will work with you tirelessly to make your bed bug issue a past issue and give you back the peace of mind you deserve.

There are four significant types of roaches that we find inside structures in Pennsylvania.  There is the American roach, the Oriental roach, the seldom found Brown Banded roach, and by far the most significant (pictured here) the German Cockroach.  Left untreated and in ideal conditions, a single mating pair of  German roaches can become a population of thousands within 6 months.  Contrary to the beliefs of most people, the presence of German roaches is not indicative of unsanitary conditions.  They are able to breed and thrive in even the cleanest of environments.  Like many common pests, most DIY efforts at controlling German roaches ultimately contribute to a scattering of the population, making the situation worse in the long run instead of better.