Pest Control in Urban and Rural Environments

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The Reason Rat Poison Causes Fly Season

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When a rat and its family take up residence in your place of work, you may be tempted to put down some poison and be done with them. After all, once a rat is dead, it can no longer bother you, right? No more gnawing noises in the wall, no more droppings on the floor and no more midnight raids on the contents of the staff kitchen. Victory, and peace at last.

That is, until the stench hits. If rats are nesting in the walls, ceilings or foundations of a building, when poisoned, they will die there too—likely along with their mate and offspring. But the sickly, sweet odour of decay will just be the beginning, for you are not the only one that can smell a dead rat. Flies too can smell them, however, to a fly, a rotting rat is a day care centre.

Flies Can Smell Rotting Rats

Once a rat dies in the walls of your office or business, you may not see it, but you will certainly smell it. When anything dies, microbes begin to break down the tissue of the resulting corpse. This process of decay produces gases. If the area where the rat died is accessible to insects, which is more than likely given all the nooks and crannies in a building, flies will find it.

The antennae of a fly are able to detect the scent of a dead animal. A recently deceased rat serves as the ideal egg-laying site for a pregnant female. The first species of fly to show up is usually the blowfly, followed later by flesh flies and soldier flies. Once they home in on the corpse, the least of your worries will be the smell emanating from the walls.

One Blow Fly Can Cause an Infestation

If even a single pregnant blow fly discovers the corpse of the poisoned rat festering in the wall of your business or workplace, within a week, you'll have a fly infestation on your hands. One pregnant female lays hundreds of eggs from which an army of maggots soon emerges to feast on the corpse—or corpses—hidden in the wall.

Five days later, your place of business will be home to hundreds of metallic-coloured flies. While you and your colleagues are busy doing the Australian salute as you search for the source of the flymageddon, those flies will be mating and laying yet more eggs. Unless you act quickly to locate the poisoned rats, your office will be lost under a cloud of flies.

You'll Need an Exterminator to Locate the Source

Since the deceased rats are likely hidden behind a wall, in the ceiling or even under the floorboards, finding them is going to be difficult. You may be able to pinpoint the area where the corpses of the rats are by following the trail of flies. If they are emerging from behind a light fitting, for example, the dead rats are probably somewhere in the ceiling.

Getting to them may prove difficult, unless you hire a pest controller. Using a fibre optic camera, a pest controller can drill a small hole in a wall, insert the camera and locate the source of the fly infestation. They can then remove the corpses before eradicating the fly swarm and their offspring.

Hire a Pest Control Service to Deal With Rats

Unless the rats or mice that are bothering you or your business are nesting outside (difficult to confirm), hire a pest controller to deal with the issue. Traps need to be placed and any likely entrances or exits identified and dealt with. Even if you manage to successfully trap a rat on its own, that won't stop any other rats that might use the same method of entry in future.

Unless you are a fan of doing the Australian salute, do not use poison to deal with rats in your place of work. Hire a professional to make sure the job is done safely and without the risk of flies taking advantage of your handiwork. For more information, contact companies like Blakes Pest Management.


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