Museum Church Management

Managing pests in museums and churches can be a stimulating, challenging, profitable niche for PCOs, but it requires a great deal of forethought and a `tread lightly, look before you leap' approach.

Museums and churches are mankind's treasure chests. They hold the jewels and treasures of the past. They also have pirates that would like to steal and deface these objects. These pirates are known as pests.

The pest control industry is called upon to protect museums and churches, and the precious, sometimes irreplaceable objects they contain, from pests. The challenge of working with these types of facilities is rewarding and stimulating, but is very different from other segments of the urban and industrial pest control markets.

FIRST STEP: I.D. In any pest management strategy, it is important to know your enemy. Major pests of museums and churches include:

• Webbing clothes moth: Tineola bisselliella.

• Casemaking clothes moth: Tinea pellionella.

• House mouse: Mus musculus.

• Silverfish, bristletail: Thysanura, Lepismatidae.

• Varied carpet beetle: Anthrenus verbasci.

• Black carpet beetle: Attagenus unicolor.

• Woodworm: Anobium punctatum.

By knowing the biology and habits of these pests of museums and churches, it is much easier to create an environment that they will be unable to tolerate, so that they will leave or die.

Pest management is the ability to use all the resources available to create this harsh living environment for pests. And this can be done with or without pesticides.

NONCHEMICAL CONTROL. Pheromone traps and nonbaited sticky traps are important detection tools. They are the eyes and ears that work day and night to help you identify a potential pest problem before it becomes a serious outbreak.

"The use of the webbing clothes moth pheromone traps at the Field Museum of Natural History (in Chicago) was one of the most successful preventive conservation measures I have been involved with," said Christine DelRe, a Chicago-based conservation consultant. "We were able to achieve all of the goals we had set for ourselves."

Pheromone-baited traps can be placed in sensitive areas. These include the collection area that has animal products, such as:

• Wool.

• Woolen blends.

• Natural history objects (e.g. animal mounts).

• Botanicals.

• Grains.

• Wood.

Pheromone traps are available for the fol lowing museum pests:

• Woodworm: Anobium punctatum.

• Webbing clothes moth: Tineola bisselliella.

• Drugstore beetle: Stegobium paniceum.

• Cigarette beetle: Lasioderma serricorne.

• Indian meal moth: Plodia interpunctella.

Articles that have wool in them are highly susceptible to infestation by clothes moths and should be inspected on a regular basis. They could be placed in a freezer annually for one week at 18°C to 20°C. These items then should be identified with a red sticker and dated. This will warn others in the future that these objects are sensitive.

Diatomaceous earth is an inert low-toxic product used in void areas and around areas that will not be disturbed. It creates a harsh environment that the insects can't tolerate, and causes them to desiccate and die.

TREADING LIGHTLY. The pest control operator should understand that he is not allowed to touch any objects without permission. The museum or church conservator will normally move any objects that need to be closely inspected.

Curators and conservators, who have been entrusted with the care and protection of these objects, have a serious attitude toward this responsibility. Their standards are high and they are very detail-oriented. An example of this might be questions regarding what insecticide is being used and what the carrier in the insecticide is. Products that have a xylene base can cause problems with certain types of metals.

A beautiful silver jewelry collection from Toledo, Spain, was not able to be restored to its original luster because it had been stored in a room that had a carpet attached to the floor with an adhesive, and the adhesive caused the silver to tarnish. No one had thought to ask what was in the carpet adhesive.

Remember that the first responsibility of the museum or church conservator is to store and protect the precious objects within it for the future. The second responsibility is to display them to the public. The normal museum will exhibit only 5% or less of the objects that it has in its collection; the remainder is stored in a collection area for teaching and preservation for the future.

Remember too that the people who work in museums and churches generally are not well-versed with insects and pests. They are normally very educated, well-read, anti-pesticide, and have not taken the time to study pest control to any great degree or depth.

CHEMICAL CONTROL. Most insecticide applications should be limited to spot treatments, and these should be undertaken only if the sticky traps have shown an increase in activity. The type of insecticide that should be used will depend on the type of insects that need to be controlled.

Always check with the museum for an approved list of insecticides and solvents.

INERT GASSES. Much has been investigated and written regarding the use of inert gasses, such as carbon dioxide, argon, ozone and nitrogen, for museum and church pest management. At first glance they look very nontoxic, safe, easy to work with and easily available. In reality they are extremely dangerous to work with. They are nonresidual and not nontoxic.

While treating a large museum's fumigation vault with carbon dioxide, the author noted that even a sealed fumigation vault leaked carbon dioxide so readily that after two hours the area had to be evacuated and the fumigation was aborted. Unless the structure is built to contain the inert gas, it is not tight enough. The level of carbon dioxide needed to kill all life stages of insect is 60% for four days at 20°C. The level of nitrogen needed is 99.7%. Insects are able to survive in environments that contain at least 0.5% oxygen.

Several deaths have occurred recently from people not taking inert gasses seriously. When the oxygen level drops below 16%, death to humans occurs quickly.

Museums like the Getty Conservation Institute in Marina del Ray, Calif., have used inert gasses successfully to deinfest objects. The Rentokil Bubble and other similar enclosures have been used for museum fumigations throughout the world. Special safety features have made it possible to fumigate objects inside the museum without taking them off-site.

Sulfuryl fluoride (Vikane, manufactured by DowElanco) is registered for churches in Europe. Gerhardt Binker of Binker Materialsschulz, Schwaig, Germany, has successfully shown how to use sulfuryl fluoride in churches infested with woodworms. Much expertise, instrumentation, and manufacturer stewardship is needed when fumigating with sulfuryl fluoride.

Sulfuryl fluoride has fewer side-effects on museum objects than the other fumigants. Phosphine and methyl bromide are rarely used in museums because of the possible side-effects that can occur to metals and animal hairs, respectively. One church in Europe was recently fumigated with phosphine by a large pest control firm. All of the gold leafing on the church and the pictures was irreversibly corroded and turned black by the phosphine. When using fumigants, take care to consult the label and the manufacturer.

COLD TREATMENT. One of the most accepted deinfestation tools for museums and churches is cold treatment. Obviously, care should be taken to not freeze some objects, but there are many objects that will allow this pesticide-free technique.

Objects being treated should be wrapped in plastic bags first to prevent damage from condensation. A gradual re-heating of the object after the cold treatment is advised. Heat and cold are being used successfully in pest management programs throughout the world today.

The "gatekeeper" approach to pest management involves a pest prevention program rather than a pest control program. Someone should be trained to inspect all boxes, objects, or articles that enter the museum or church. If the articles have any suspect infestible items in them, they go to a quarantined area in the building. This could be an old fumigation chamber, a trailer, or an isolated room. The boxes are then scheduled to be fumigated or placed in a freezer. After they are treated, they receive a green sticker that shows that they have been treated.

It is easier to stop pests from entering a building than it is to have to eradicate an infestation. Pest prevention is a very important step in a museum pest management program.

BIRD & WASP NESTS. Birds and wasps often have nests on or near a museum or church. These are harborage areas for Dermestid beetles when the nests become abanwere living in the nests and feeding on the dead spiders that were captured by the adults for their young. When the young emerged from the nests, the beetles established a colony in the feathers, furs, and woolens in the museum collections. By physically removing the wasp nests and spot-treating that area of the attic with a synthetic pyrethroid, the problem has been subdued and the wasps have not returned this year.

Many natural history museums use wasp nests or hornet nests for display. These nests are often the site of Dermestid infestations. The Dermestids shed several cast skins in their larval stage. These cast skins are signs of where the larvae have been feeding.

RODENTS. Insects are destructive, but mice and other rodents are terrible in a church or museum. They damage valuable objects by gnawing or urinating on them, or by taking material from them to use in their bedding or nests.

The key to rodent control in museums and churches is to build them out. High weeds on the outside of the buildings will create harborages for these pests. Care should be taken to put door sweeps on all doors leading to the outside and to maintain them.

Once rodents have established an infestation indoors, an all-out effort is needed to find the creatures and remove them. Rodent urine will fluoresce under a black light. Mechanical wind-up traps can be used near openings to the outdoors. Care should be taken to protect the loading and unloading ramps. This is the "gatekeeper" for the building, and is most important in inspecting any inbound supplies or new objects.

GETTING PAID. When thinking about nontoxic pest control, many practitioners often wonder how they will be paid for their services if they don't spray an insecticide or fumigate something. Pest control professionals should be paid for solving problems and not for how many gallons of "bug spray" they disseminate. They should also be paid for the time they inspect and examine their monitoring devices.

It can be very gratifying to leave all of your spraying equipment in your vehicle and walk into a building with nothing but a clipboard, a flashlight, and the knowledge stored inside your mind. After many questions to the owner and a thorough inspection, a pest management program can begin to take shape. Each additional visit may need some fine-tuning to help create a proactive program that starts with the insect first and uses a least-toxic chemical approach along with a pest prevention program.

The future of the pest control industry is to find niches that require added expertise, and to get paid for being problem-solvers. Developing a pest management philosophy is important. It starts when the phone rings and a customer has a problem to solve. The first question that you should ask is, "What is the target pest?"

Museum and church pest management can be a stimulating and profitable niche in pest control that will offer the PCO many new challenges.