Keep Bugs, Snakes, Mice, & Bats Out of Your Home (September 2, 2001):

What can you do to keep these critters out of your home? For bugs take Diazon or Bug B Gone from Ortho and spray about 5 feet up on your house and down the foundation. Spray any bushes around the house and about 5 feet out in to the yard. If you have ants coming mix 1/3 boric acid, 1/3 powder sugar, and 1/3 corn meal. Put this in Styrofoam containers and set them around the outside of your house around the foundation. The worker ants are coming into your house hunting for food. This makes their job easier so they don't have to come in, and the boric acid will kill off the ants in the hill. You can also use this inside your house. If a pet gets in it, it will burn their tongue and they will leave it alone.

For snakes, make sure you have all rock, stone, and brush cleaned up, they love to live in areas with a lot of stone and brush. Get Snake A Way and follow the directions on the bottle. This works well if you follow directions and clean the area up. This puts a barrier down they don't like to cross. If you want to trap one, take a section of downspout and put a Glue Mouse Trap in the center of it, lay this along the foundation of your house. Snakes like to go in areas like a downspout and hide, when they hit the glue trap they are stuck and will struggle to death trying to get loose. Just tip the gutter and let it slide out in to the garbage. Remember, snakes do eat a lot of bugs. They are useful.

Do you have bats in your attic? Since it’s against the law to kill bats, this will drive them out with out killing them. Bats eat a lot of bugs so they are useful and we need them. But, if you’d like to get rid of them, take an old nylon, put some Bye Bye Birdie in it, and hang it from your rafters in the attic. The smell of this will drive birds and bats out. Now, if you want to keep them out you need to seal all cracks, holes, and cover your vents with hardware cloth. If you don't seal crack and holes they will be back. Do not seal off vents. You must have air movement in your attic, so cover them with hardware cloth. If you have birds nesting in areas where you don't want them, you can put Tangle Foot where they stand, this will irritate their feet and drive them away. The owls and snakes you can buy will work too, but you have to keep moving them around or the birds will get wise to it.

Mice come in to your home hunting for food and water. If you have them in your house you need to get rid of them because they spread all kinds of diseases. At Home Hardware, we have the new Rat Zapper. This uses 4 AA batteries and electrocutes the mice. Then you just pick up the Rat Zapper and dump them in the garbage. If you don't want to use poisons or traps, here are a couple safe tips. Take instant potatoes and set them out dry. The mice will eat them and they will swell up when they hit the moisture in the stomach. It will plug them up and kill them. You can also take equal parts of cocoa mix and powdered plaster mix, they will eat this and it will harden in their stomach and kill them. With these tips, you don't have to worry about other animals eating them and getting poisoned. If you cannot find these products in your area let us know and we will be glad to UPS them to you. A lot of these bugs and pests are starting to find a winter home so now is the time to take care of these problems.