Riders on the Scum

You would not believe how often I see cockroaches on the New York City Subway system.

Quite often I find them dead, but I've seen live ones too.

In most instances I'm guessing they are hitchhikers so to speak, riding in someone's belongings or clothing.  Maybe it came from their apartment, maybe from the restaurant they just ate at, and it came right into the train and decided to try to get off at a different stop.

I think this guy was on the 6 train.

Sometimes when I'm on the train I feel like falling down and sticking my legs up in the air.

Notice how he has his legs spread, taking up more space than he should be.

Ew york city will not be here on Monday.  We're shooting for Tuesday hopefully.

Have a good weekend.

Eating Rodents

This is a rodent I ate back in 2007.  You know cuy.

As we think of alternate food sources and entomophagy and other subjects, we've got to stay open to the opportunity to eat rodents.

This one was quite delicious.  I even ate the internal organs and the brain and eyes, which I'll post another time.

Ew york city is busy, but we'll make time for you tomorrow.

Bed Bug Eggs

Our service manager Nick furnished us with this nice bed bug related photo.

This was photographed on the bed frame in an apartment in Brooklyn.  It is an extreme closeup.  

The translucent blue things are bed bug eggs, and it appears that the babies may have hatched already.

The darker blue lumps are bed bug feces.  The bugs have already been feeding for some time.  We did find adults and various instar stages as well, so the fecal matter might be from them.

The bluish color is due to the lighting, not the actual color of the eggs or feces.  

The person who lived in this room did not believe that he had bed bugs, so he most likely does not react to their bites, which can sometimes make identification a little more difficult.

Another challenge with this particular apartment is the amount of clutter the tenants have.  That always makes the job more challenging for us, and more expensive for you, so it's in everybody's interest to throw away that collection of plastic shopping bags from C-Town and those boxes of VHS tapes you haven't looked at in years.

The bed bug eggs are about this size of this comma, not the word comma, but the actual comma after the word comma earlier in this sentence.  If you have an iPhone, they're about the size of the numeral "1" on the time display at the top center of the face of the phone's main display.  They're small.  And as I have mentioned before, they come equipped with an adhesive on the outside that enables them to stick and be transported by nice people like you to other nice people.

If you were hired and funded to design a more efficient pest than the bed bug, I doubt you could do it.

Bring it.

Ew York City will be with you again tomorrow.

Busy grimes

Here's another perfect example of how a cleaning crew can get the easy spots but miss things that are harder.

This restaurant kitchen was really clean, except behind the legs of the appliances, where it was filthy dirty nasty cruddy.

Again, I get it.  You're busy.  They're busy.  Business is busy.  Life's busy.  Bees are busy.  Beavers are busy.  The squeegie guy is busy.  Your third grade art teacher was busy.  The guy leaning against you on the train is busy.  The middle-aged diner waitress with the T-shirt that says "I'm busy" is busy.  So yes, everybody is busy.

But so are pests!  And if you leave them anything like what you see in the picture above, they will get even busier, overnight even.

So the plan is, schedule occasional but regular deep cleanings; once a week, once every other week, etc., so that you are regularly getting to all these spots.

Because life is too busy to be too busy...

Ew york city might be back tomorrow.

This Is Not Today's Post

Bed Worms

Bed bugs aren't the only bugs we find in peoples' beds.

In this instance, we found a good number of beetle larvae wriggling around this person's mattress.  These were carpet beetle larvae, a fairly common pest in the NYC area.

Here is a closeup of what one looks like from a photo on the infraweb, all rights reserved:

Often times these larvae will cause skin reactions on people similar to bed bug bites.  That, plus the fact that they also can hang out in your bed, often causes people to think that they have bed bugs when actually they do not.

The best advice I can give you for this situation is to vacuum.  Get a vacuum with an extendable hose and a fine tipped attachment and suck the worms out of your bed.  The larvae can in fact do damage to your fabrics, so that might motivate you if the thought of worms crawling around your bed was not enough.

On another note, I want to thank all of our readers for helping to make Ew York City the number one destination for my pest related pictures throughout the entire world.  We couldn't have done it without each other, and I sincerely hope that these past pest posts have inspired you to keep your world a little cleaner, a little leaner, and a little cleaner.

Ew York City will be back Monday.  Keep on the straight and narrow.

Look into you looking into you

Nice sized hole in the wall of a boiler room in the basement of a Brooklyn restaurant.

Basement was full of rat droppings.

Two words:

Cement

Ew York City will be back tomorrow for the final post of winter 2014-15.