The only thing worse than mice or cockroaches feeding on breadcrumbs in your kitchen is finding them munching on invaluable paintings and artifacts in your museum or library. Insect pests are responsible for significant damage to museum objects, historic books, and in buildings of historical or architectural importance. Various wood-boring beetles, various moths, and booklice can destroy materials, objects, and building parts. Termites, cockroaches, and other insect pests are also common in museums and libraries, and their presence results in even greater damage of wood and paper materials.   Insects do not infest all items in equal ways, however. At the highest risk of infestation are natural history collections, dried insect collections, dry plant materials, stuffed animals, items containing fur, and keratin or chitin-based materials. Usually, items made from these vulnerable materials are stored together in dark areas, making the spread of infestation easier and more successful.   In the past, pest control in such collection-holding institutions involved regular applications of insecticides to the infested areas and to the objects themselves.

  Rodent control is often an unsettling subject - no one feels comfortable in the presence of unwelcome pests. In the case of restaurants and food processing businesses, however, the problem of rodent control goes beyond personal comfort and into significant public image and financial loss. A restaurant's success is determined by its public reputation, and nothing destroys a hard-earned reputation faster than a rodent scurrying across a room where food is served and/or prepared.   Rodents, along with flies and cockroaches, are the bane of any food service operation, as they are directly and/or indirectly the cause of:  

• Food contamination
• Infrastructure damage
• Building and structural damage
• Lost time and productivity
• Psychological wellbeing and health of owners, employees, and customers
• Loss of revenue
• Reputation damage
• Legal liability

  Tough public health guidelines against rodents exist for good reason, and the reason is that rodents carry numerous pathogens and bacteria that cause life-threatening diseases in humans and other animals.

  The majority of first-time home buyers take their time to carefully inspect the physical condition of the property they’re planning to acquire. They look for defects or malfunctions in the building’s foundation, roof, plumbing, electrical and heating/cooling systems while making sure of the sound state of walls, floors, windows, and doors. But before they go ahead and seal the deal, a question inevitably pops into their head: Is there something lurking below the surface that they might have missed?   Unfortunately, the answer is often: Yes. Particularly when the home is up for sale by owner, the goal is to accentuate the property’s best features and minimize its potential flaws. And while some sellers are trustworthy and willing to disclose the information about past and present pest infestations, others are either unaware of pests’ presence in the house or are doing everything they can to hide the damage. By spotting the signs of the following common household pests before you close the deal, you can make sure the seller covers the cost and treatment of the existing infestation before handing you the keys.

  In Canada, more than half of all children ages 6 months to 5 years spend the largest part of their waking hours in early learning and child care facilities. During those hours, an important part of their time is spent on or near the ground, floor, and other areas where potentially harmful pests and pesticide residues may be present.   Because of their lower body weight, stage of development, and rapid metabolism, infants and toddlers are much more susceptible to pesticide poisoning than adults, according to The Canadian Partnership for Children’s Health and the Environment (CPCHE).   They eat, drink, and breathe more than adults do, so they not only come into closer contact with more indoor pollutants, but are also more sensitive to them (since they will get a bigger dose per body size compared to adults). Young children also explore the world by touching objects and putting their hands in their mouths, which increases the risk of exposure to pesticides and cleaning products.

  As much as you may hate going into your backyard and stepping into a pile of stinking black-and-green goose droppings, taking matters into your own hands to escape their annoying presence might even cause you problems with the law.   Last month, a 56-year-old man from Woodbury, Vermont, had his hunting, fishing, and trapping license suspended for one year after he was convicted for shooting Canadian geese on his property with a high-powered pellet rifle. The defendant, who pleaded no contest to the charge, declared that he only wanted to scare the geese away from his property and had no intention of killing them.   Similar charges await three men from North Carolina, who killed five geese at the Pine Knolls Golf Course during the closed hunting season and without having a federal or state permit to kill the geese. One of the men, who was also the owner of the golf course, told the police that they were only trying to remove the geese from the course because they were a nuisance and damaging the golf course with their highly acidic feces.