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Fall is a wonderful season with the beautiful foliage, clear skies, and cooler temperatures. It’s a great time to be outdoors. While, you might be looking for outdoor activities this time of year, bugs are looking for the indoors. During the fall months, insects begin looking for warmer places to spend the night and where they can spend the winter. The place they find may be your home.

Ladybugs, spiders, crickets, roaches, box elder bugs, millipedes, and many more insects begin their search in the fall for a warm place to make their home. Before you are overrun with these tiny little creatures, you might want to try some prevention techniques.

Home maintenance professionals recommend a maintenance plan for your home to help you save energy during the cold months of winter. But, many of the same techniques the maintenance professionals recommend also help in keeping out insects, mice, birds, and bats.

Many insects enter your home by crawling or flying in through cracks in the doors. If you use a screen door during the cooler, fall months, make sure the door fits well and that you don’t have holes in the screen. A door, screen or solid, that has cracks along the sides, bottom, or at the top, not only will let air in, but it also lets in tiny insects. Check along the edges of your doors to make sure the weather stripping is in good shape. If it is old and doesn’t seal your door any longer replace it with new weather stripping. You can buy weather stripping at nearly any hardware or home maintenance store.

Did you know that mice can squeeze into an area the size of a dime? They can, and with that in mind, you should take a close look around the outside of your house. Keep a dime in your pocket so you will remember just how small the holes can be. Often, you will find holes around outside water facets, next to windows, doors, and where electrical and cable enters your home. You should seal these areas with foam insulation, caulking, wood putty, or a small patch of concrete, depending on where the holes are found. Check the areas around the foundation of your home especially, because at the foundation is where weather could have caused some damage over the past year or so, and it is a good place for pests to enter. When sealing the holes, keep in mind that you may not be keeping out just a mouse. You may be keeping out carpenter ants, beetles, spiders, and a whole list of other insects, so you probably want to seal these areas even if they are smaller than a dime.

Check around your windows for cracks in the caulking and where the window fits into the frame. If the caulking is old and weathered and it is no longer keeping the air from coming into the home, you should scrape out the old caulk and put in a fresh new coat. Any number of insects can scale your home, even to the second story, to get in through a crack in the window.

Check the gable vents in your home. Bats, birds, and flying insects love warm attics during the fall and winter months. The air vent screens should be of a small mesh and should not have any holes. Remember, the mouse and the dime here too. Mice are known to scale walls, and they could enter your attic very easily if the screen is old and worn enough that they can chew through.

Fall is a wonderful season, and it’s a great time to prepare for the winter months ahead. If you do a little home maintenance this fall, be sure to keep in mind that not only do you want to keep the cold air out, but you also want to keep pests from moving in as well.

For information on how to get rid of these insects, visit www.pestproductsonline.com.

About the Author:
Dennise Brogdon is the managing editor of the Hughston Health Alert, a quarterly, patient-information newsletter, and she is an editorial assistant for the National Athletic Trainers’ Association’s scientific journal, the Journal of Athletic Training. Dennise is a Web site copywriter and editor. She has experience writing and editing SEO copy and META tags, brochures, advertorials, video scripts, and other technical and promotional material, as well. Dennise earned a BA in English with professional writing as an emphasis at Columbus State University. She is a member of the American Medical Writers Association and the Georgia Writers Association.