FLEA TREATMENTS

If you have discovered fleas on your pet, your home is already under attack! There will soon be (if there’s not already) eggs, pupae, and larvae wherever your pet likes to lay around or play. Cats and dogs pick up newly hatched, hungry adult fleas from an infested environment. Any area that is inhabited by other cats, dogs, or wildlife (like raccoons, foxes, opossums, etc….) may be infested with fleas. Sometimes people have flea problems without even having pets, depends on wildlife activity around your home. To make it worse, fleas are VERY hardy little parasites that can lay dormant for several months in all 4 life stages, and only need the subtle vibrations of you or your pet approaching to wake up and hop on to feed. So what can you do about these mean little parasites now that you have them? First, lets take a look at the flea itself….

• Adult fleas live on your pet. They do not jump from pet to pet or pet to human.
• They live on the pet and bite them to feed on their blood
• A female flea can lay up to 50 eggs PER DAY! This means your problem could get big really quick.
• When irritated by the biting, your dog scratch and your cat licks. This turns them into a “salt-shaker” for fleas, dropping them anywhere they frequent
• Flea eggs in the environment of your house (carpet, beds, sofa, etc) hatch into larvae in as little as 1 day
• Larvae then move away from light, deep into carpets and cracks in flooring where they feed off organic matter before spinning themselves into a cocoon and becoming a pupa, which is nearly indestructible.
• Inside this cocoon, the new adult flea develops
• New adult fleas in their protective cocoons lie in wait for the next available blood meal – either a pet or human
• People walking around or pets breathing close to the ground provide stimuli, such as vibration, warmth, or carbon dioxide in exhaled breath. These signal the waiting flea to hatch and jump – a blood meal has arrived!

At Four Seasons, we have a lot experience fighting these unwanted guests and would like to help you rid your home of your current infestation. We use a 3-part pesticide system that delivers 3 important factors in the elimination of a flea outbreak. One part is a residual, that will act in killing all of the fleas that should hatch out from the carpet or flooring over the next 30-45 days. The second part acts as a quick knock-down for the adults that are present in the home lying in wait for their next feeding. The third part is an Insect Growth Regulator (IGR) that inhibits the hatching of viable flea eggs and prevents the development of larvae into adult fleas. So after 30 days or so with this product in your home, we are confident that your home will be “flea-free,” but fleas don’t go away in 1-2 days. Understand that with any treatment, a certain amount of assistance on your part is necessary to achieve the desired result. You will have to take certain steps to prepare your pet and home prior to the arrival of our technician. Those steps are………

• Tidy up the everyday clutter in your home so that the pesticide will reach the floor in each area
• Vacuum all the floors and carpets, paying special attention to areas that pets frequent. If the pet likes to jump up on and lay on anything, be sure to vacuum that area too.
• Be sure to start the process with a clean vacuum bag and throw it away outside when you are finished. Sucking them up in the vacuum alone will not kill an adult flea.
• Our treatment will be to all the floors and upholstered furniture in your home, not just the areas commonly visited by your pet. Be sure to tell the technician which areas your pet likes to frequent.
• The technician will want to treat under the bed, so be sure to clean out and vacuum that area too.
• Make sure to wash all of your bedding, your pet’s bedding, and any clothes that pets may have been laying on the day of the service, and DO NOT bring them back into the home until the service is completed.
• Get your pet treated the day of, or just before, the service date. For the service to work, your pet MUST BE ON A FLEA PREVENTION program.
• After the service is complete, vacuum your carpeted areas every 24-48 hours – this will help to stimulate all of the flea pupae out of their cocoons and into the residual pesticide in the carpet, as well as sweeping up any eggs and/or cocoons that have become unattached from the carpet.

As you can see, flea jobs take a lot of preparation and patience in order to be successful. It is important that you realize because of the strength of the cocoons and the deep hiding places they find that you will continue to see fleas up to a month after the treatment. Just rest assured that if they found their way out onto you, they have passed through the residual somewhere and will soon be dead.