You’ve designed your home for your comfort, and you’ve taken effort to keep it dry, warm, and safe from the outside world. However, these same traits can sometimes make it an incredibly attractive place for critters that haven’t exactly asked your permission to live there. While you tend to notice if you have pests in your living space, you might miss animals that are living in the improperly protected insulated parts of your house.
The insulation of your house can be an attractive target for these critters if it’s accessible. It’s defended from the weather and from many predators that can’t fit into the walls of your house. Here are a few pests that might make their home in the walls of your home.
Mice and Roof Rats
When we think of pests, often the first thing we think of is mice and rats, and for good reason. Some of the most common pests and potent vectors for disease, mice, and rats will often chew their way into spaces that have been insulated with cellulose foams and make nests for their families there. You often won’t notice until they’ve made their way inside to the kitchen, but a lot of rat and mouse problems start in the insulation and only later move into the house.
Wasp and Bee Nests
Wasps and bees love to dig their way in through the wood of a house and nest inside the insulated space in the wall. People have found huge colonies up and down the inside structure of their walls time and time again.
Ticks
Ticks have been moving northward every year and becoming more and more populous. Traditionally living in leaf litter for their natural insulation, it is no surprise that, come winter, some varieties of ticks have been known to move inside your insulation. Ticks can carry not only the dreaded Lyme Disease but also many hundreds of other difficult to treat parasitic diseases. A tick nest in your walls is no joke.
If you have any questions or concerns about pests in your insulation, please reach out and let us talk you through it. A little work is all that’s necessary to keep your house yours and prevent these pests from setting up roost.
