Gale Ridge could tell something was wrong as soon as the man walked into her office at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station. He was smartly dressed in a collared shirt and slacks, but his skin didn’t look right: It was bright pink, almost purple — and weirdly glassy.

Without making eye contact, he sat hunched in the chair across from Ridge and began to speak. He was an internationally renowned physician and researcher. He had taught 20 years’ worth of students, treating patients all the while, and had solved mysteries about the body’s chemistry and how it could be broken by disease. But now, he was having health issues he didn’t know how to deal with.

“He was being eaten alive by insects,” Ridge, an entomologist, recalled recently. “He described these flying entities that were coming at him at night and burrowing into his skin.”

Their progeny, too, he said, seemed to be inside his flesh. He’d already seen his family doctor and dermatologist. He’d hired an exterminator to no avail. He had tried Epsom salts, vinegar, medication. So he took matters into his own hands, filling his bathtub with insecticide and clambering in for some relief.

But even that wasn’t working. The biting, he said, would begin again. Ridge tried her best to help. “What I did was talk to him, explaining the different biologies of known arthropods that can live on people ... trying to get him to understand that what he is seeing is not biologically known to science,” she said.

She saw him only four or five times. Three weeks after he first walked into her office, she heard that he was dead. Heart attack, the obituaries declared. No mention of invisible bugs, psychological torment, self-mutilation. But the entomologist was convinced that wasn’t the whole story.

Officially, as a scientist in the state Experiment Station’s insect inquiry office, Gale Ridge’s job is to help the public with many-legged creatures that actually exist. She has an “open-door policy”: Anyone can walk in, ring the service bell, and benefit from her expertise. It might sound like some dusty holdover from another, more agricultural time, when the fates of Connecticutters and critters were more closely intertwined. Records tell a different story. Between July 1, 2015, and June 30, 2016, the office dealt with some 8,516 inquiries. That’s over 23 a day.

Her clients enter brandishing pill bottles, jam jars, and Tupperware containing roaches and weevils, meal moths and fabric moths, bedbugs and stinkbugs. Tiny mangled spiders come in on bits of Scotch tape; gypsy moth caterpillars by the wriggling bucketful. Some people even send in live beetles by mail: The envelopes arrive empty, with chew marks in the corner.

In an age where we think more about software bugs than living ones, public entomologists like Ridge may be more important than ever, helping us make sense of the un-digital world. Ridge has seen it all. She has helped gardeners identify the scourges of their crops, she’s guided homeowners through the treacherous terrain of bedbug control, and she’s helped police investigate a murder by examining the maggots found writhing in the victim’s flesh.

But her most difficult cases haven’t involved spiders or bedbugs or chiggers or mites. Instead, the hardest bugs she has to deal with are the ones that aren’t really there.

She labels these cases DP, short for delusional parasitosis. Some entomologists prefer Ekbom syndrome, because it carries less stigma. In the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which most psychiatrists use, the condition is listed as one kind of delusional disorder, defined as an unshakeable belief that you are being attacked by bugs or parasites even when there is no evidence of infestation.

If said or jotted down by someone else, those words would be a diagnosis, but the “doctor” that precedes Ridge’s name is a Ph.D. rather than an M.D. It was earned from the University of Connecticut in 2008, with a 998-page thesis on externally identical species, identifiable only through dissection: You wash away their soft tissues and look at their inner architecture, with a special eye for the spurs where exoskeleton and muscle connect. It’s scientifically useful, but about as un-medical as you can get.

Yet as far as Ridge can tell, when it comes to DP, most physicians don’t have much training. Some doctors look at the person’s own scratch marks and think they’re insect bites; some prescribe parasite-killing medicines that don’t work because there are no parasites to kill. When the bites and bugs don’t go away, some refer the patients to an entomologist.

Others brusquely tell the patient that their problem isn’t medical, or that they are crazy. “It makes me really angry. ... Nobody takes them seriously,” said Dr. Nienke Vulink, a psychiatrist at the Academic Medical Center in Amsterdam. “Most doctors, including dermatologists or general practitioners, within five minutes they know — or they think they know — it’s not a medical problem. Within 10 minutes, they send them away. But these patients are really suffering.”

To be fair, DP poses a challenge even for the best-trained physician. You might know that the best treatment is an antipsychotic, but getting patients to accept that prescription or to see the proper specialist can be nearly impossible: The patients believe that the proper medication is not an antipsychotic but an antiparasitic, that the correct expert is not a psychiatrist but an insect specialist.

So they seek out entomologists: Ridge sees as many as 200 of these cases a year. She isn’t the only one with this unintentional expertise. A whole network of entomologists — at universities, research stations, and even at natural history museums — is all too familiar with these requests.

“Every state has somebody like Gale or me,” said Nancy Hinkle, a professor of veterinary entomology at the University of Georgia, in Athens. She estimates that these inquiries take up about 20 percent of her time. “I tend to stay a couple of hours every day to deal with the invisible bugs.”

To the medical community, DP is rare; in the insect world, it’s anything but — and entomologists around the country say they are seeing more and more cases. Fifteen years ago, Hinkle got maybe one DP call a week; now she gets one a day. It’s hard to say whether that’s an increase in raw numbers, or if the internet has just made it easier to reach an entomologist. Either way, there is a stark discrepancy.

“This may in fact be a much more common problem than is reported in the medical literature,” said Dr. Daniel Wollman, who teaches at Quinnipiac University’s medical school. “The entomologists are seeing 10 times as many people than actually come to the attention of medical professionals. Maybe it’s not so rare.”

Ridge is collaborating with Wollman and a medical student to try to figure out the incidence of DP, and to develop diagnostic guidelines. But all that is in service of a more pressing goal: to prevent people’s lives from unraveling. “I’ve had one death and two suicides in 20 years of work,” she said — but there have been plenty of other clients who have isolated themselves, thrown out their belongings, and ended up living out of a car.

These stories tell a kind of cautionary tale. Ask her about DP, and the case of the doctor-turned-patient is among the first that jumps into her mind: “It’s a loss of life that I don’t think should have happened.” With the right medical care, he might still be alive.

For someone terrorized by insects, an entomologist’s office is at once the best and worst place to go for help. The best, because those labs are uniquely equipped to identify what bugs you; the worst, because they can seem like an entomophobic’s personalized circle of hell.

Take Ridge’s office. When I visited in January, its shelves were crowded with jars of French brandy preserving whitish beetle grubs and caddis fly larvae still stuck in their protective pebble cases. In the front, where the visitors sit, she keeps a large tank of Madagascar hissing cockroaches: They spend most of their time lazing in the mulch like iguanas in the sun.

There’s another terrarium in the back, this one holding hundreds of American cockroaches, all descended from a bug discovered in the steam pipes of Yale. They are well provided for, with toilet paper rolls in which to congregate; fresh fruit, bread, and fish flakes to feast on; and a yellowish calcium-fortified jelly called Fluker’s Cricket Quencher, so they don’t fall into a bowl of water and drown. “Those guys there, I love them,” Ridge said, gesturing to a roll darkened with roaches. “Great bedbug killers.”

But her real pride and joy is on the other counter. That’s where she keeps her 43 colonies of bedbugs, each group in its own small canning jar covered with a fine white mesh that she buys from Jo-Ann Fabric and Craft, where it’s often sold as bridal veil. The bugs come from military bases and poultry farms, from Somalia to Argentina, Indiana to New Jersey to Vermont. Now, they live here in New Haven — pests turned study subjects. “Most bedbug research in the United States is how to kill them, and not to understand them,” she said. “And my feeling is that if you get a better understanding of how the insects tick, you are going to find the Achilles’ heel.”

Her understanding of the bugs is deep — and deeply personal. Every few weeks, Ridge carries the bedbugs out to her red Honda, puts them behind the driver’s seat, and brings them home. There, at six in the morning, she inverts the jars on the skin of her right leg. She positions them just so, leaning them up against her left thigh and covering them with a blanket so they don’t move. Then, as the bugs suck her blood through tiny holes in the bridal veil, she leans back and listens to the radio news of “Democracy Now!”

She knows this makes her sound nuts, but the bugs are tightly sealed in their jars with no chance of escaping. And in the world of bedbug research, feeding them on yourself isn’t all that unusual.

“That’s what I do,” said Louis Sorkin, an entomologist at the American Museum of Natural History. It’s easier, he said: You don’t have to raise animals for the bedbugs to feed on, or buy blood.

Still, it’s hard to match Ridge’s interspecies empathy. “There is nothing worse or more sad to see than a frustrated bedbug who can’t feed,” she told me when describing one of her experiments. She cooed parentally when showing a movie of a black widow spider that a client had found on a bunch of grapes from a local supermarket. Even her description of the smell of bedbug feces — which she doesn’t like — isn’t completely negative: To her it’s “cloying,” “sweet,” and “musky.”

This empathy developed early on, at her parents’ farm in the rich, windy grasslands of southwestern England. The nearest neighbor was three miles away, the nearest village five. They could only just hear church bells if the wind was right. There was nobody much to talk to; instead they had 90 head of cattle, and for a while, a flock of sheep.

“You were with the animals more than with people,” she said. She remembers acting as an animal midwife, reaching her small hand up into the birth canal to unlock a leg, reposition a head. She timed her movements to avoid contractions. The force would have broken her bones.

She had no particular interest in insects, though, and she grew up to be a pianist. Only in 1996, when she was looking for a more stable career that would allow her to raise a family as a single parent, did she return to school for biology. She thought she might end up in some medical-related field, but by chance she took a job in the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station — and she fell in love with insects.

Even so, she didn’t involve herself with bedbugs; instead, they got involved with her.

“I was just minding my own business as an extension person here and about 2002, pest management professionals began to come in and present me bedbugs and say, ‘Well what’s this?’” she said. “... There were three or four generations who hadn’t even seen a bedbug, didn’t know what it was. It wasn’t even on their radar. At that point, a trickle became a flood became a torrent.”

And with the bedbugs she began to see the rise of another problem. She calls it the “ugly stepsister of human-feeding bedbugs.”

It often begins with a phone call. The person hardly says hello before launching into a soliloquy, somehow insistent and hesitant at the same time.

“With those bugs, it’s terrible,” one woman told Ridge in March 2016. “I put bleach in my humidifier ... we left the house, and when we came back, the bugs ... they were angry. It’s so crazy. ... It gets in my food, and sometimes I get it between my teeth. ... I went to the doctor, and my husband’s got little bumps on his head, the mites sting him and lay their eggs there ... and when they get in your ear ...”

Even when an entomologist notices the telltale signs of DP, there is little that can be done over the phone. Biologists estimate that there are some 6.8 million arthropod species on earth; even the most fanciful description could, at its root, be a real insect.

“The main thing that I can do is encourage people to send me a sample of what they think is bothering them, because my job as an entomologist is to rule out whether there is a real bug infestation or not,” said Mike Merchant, a professor and urban entomologist at the Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service.

And they do. They bring in bags and bags of body hair. They bring in scabs and skin flakes, pocket lint and dust and generalized schmutz. One woman arrived at Ridge’s office with her car trunk full of blankets and clothing; to her, every speck of fuzz on their surface was a bug.

“There was the time an individual sent us their vomit,” said Hinkle, the Georgia entomologist. “Not infrequently we get dirty underwear. But the vast majority are skin scrapings. ... Ah, yes, I have a glamorous job.”

© Kayana Szymczak

The entomologists pick through these samples under the microscope, meticulously searching for insects. If they find none, as is often the case, then a painful conversation is in order. They tell the person that they found no insects, and then the story changes — the bugs must have escaped, or metamorphosed, or become invisible. The person promises to send more samples.

Many of these people don’t agree with the entomologist that their problem is psychological. To them, the infestation is real. They can see it, feel it, hear it — and they are determined to get rid of it.

For a middle-aged woman in Toronto, it began with a visit from an out-of-town friend, who mentioned something about an infestation picked up on a plane. She, too, began to see them. The bugs were all over the house, she said, they were all over the car, they were all over her body. She sprayed the house with a smelly “natural” insecticide. She threw out clothes, books, fake plants, mattresses, beds. Sometimes she got so afraid of the contamination she wouldn’t let her husband into the house. He took her to the doctor, leaving a note so the physician knew what was going on, but nothing changed.

“At her peak of stress and anxiety, I was seriously considering going to a judge and getting the police to take her to a mental health hospital,” he said, speaking on condition of anonymity. He had read Nancy Hinkle’s paper on the subject, and reached out to the entomologist; he knew his wife needed a psychiatrist, but she wouldn’t go.

Another woman, who lives in Atlanta, said she was misdiagnosed with scabies, and then humiliated in a hospital corridor by a doctor shouting that she was psychotic. She agreed to see a psychiatrist, but is still convinced that her skin is covered with bites. When she scratches, red, black, or white specks come out; they look like roach turds or eggs, she said. “Anybody with eyes can’t help but see it.”

For another Atlanta woman, a psychiatrist recognized the problem behind her itchiness and her obsessive cleaning, but those appointments haven’t helped. “She wants me to cut down on the cleaning ... but in my mind I can’t stop, because if my kids start getting more attacked and I haven’t cleaned ...” she said over the phone. “I’m sitting here right now and I feel things crawling all over my feet. I’ve been tested for neuropathy, MS, and cancer. I’ve been tested for everything.”

By now, she hopes the condition is psychological; she just can’t convince herself of it. “It’s ruined my life,” she said. She began to cry.

In medicine, there is a subspecialty for everything, and DP is no exception: These patients fit perfectly within the purview of clinics focusing on disorders involving both the mind and the skin. Most of these centers are in Europe — there are at least three in the Netherlands alone — but a handful are scattered across the United States, like missionary outposts spreading the gospel of psychodermatology far and wide.

At one such clinic in Amsterdam, the patient is first seen by a dermatologist. Only later, when a relationship of trust has been established, a psychiatrist joins them. “We are not telling them you have a delusion, we are not telling them you are crazy,” said Vulink, the psychiatrist who helped found the Psychodermatology Outpatient Clinic seven years ago. “The most important is that you confirm that the patient is suffering ... ‘You can’t go outside, you don’t want to see your friends anymore, you sleep separate from your partner, so we want to treat you.’”

Within a few weeks, most patients can be convinced to begin medication. A 2014 paper showed that some drugs for delusional disorders also happen to kill parasites, and Vulink sometimes uses this research to help persuade patients that these antipsychotics will relieve their suffering.

Ridge, of course, does not have the power to prescribe. She hopes instead to steer many of these people toward the proper professional. She knows, though, that someone with DP is likely to have already seen a long string of medical doctors. Visiting Ridge may be a last resort; she doesn’t want to scare them off.

Her assessment begins as soon as they walk in the door, before a word is exchanged. “It’s written all over their face,” she said. “This stiff movement, very focused, you know, clenched hands, tight body position, clear indications of high anxiety. And so my approach is to try to get them to relax. I’m somewhat jocular in the language, I keep the language very simple.”

She asks them to sit down. And then, from across the desk, she listens to whatever is bothering them. What might seem like insect bites could be caused by almost anything — mold, drug interactions, thyroid problems, a new detergent — so she takes a careful history. She asks where they live, with whom, what health problems they have. She asks about their pets.

Once, she was called in about the laundry workers at a hospital who were all convinced they were being attacked by insects. When Ridge arrived, she could feel it herself: a distinct itchiness in the air. The culprit turned out to be an industrial dehumidifier — it made the room buzz with static electricity.

When the person brings her samples, she picks through them carefully. She dumps them into a lab dish, and with the flick of a switch and the twist of a knob, they come into focus under Ridge’s microscope. The machine is connected to a screen facing outward, so everyone in the room can, at least for a moment, see through an entomologist’s eyes.

The ensuing examination is collaborative: no, that thing is not a mite but a twist of hair, not a beetle but a ball of lint. She listens, and listens, and listens, not agreeing with them, but not dismissing them either. “The medical profession is not allowed to offer time,” she said. “I can offer time.”

It sometimes takes her months to win clients’ trust. At first, they argue, citing websites like stopskinmites.com as proof of their infestation, and Ridge needs to counteract the misinformation they have found there. “This is a piece of lint,” Ridge told me, pointing to a photo that the website suggested was a mite. She sees these sites as a ruse to get people to buy pseudo-medical products, and as a danger to her clients.

“Often in the early stages there’s lot of pushback,” she said, “but they keep coming back, which means they have — deep down — doubt. I keep reassuring them: I’m not judging them.”

She can be maternal, careful to validate what her clients are feeling, becoming stern when she needs to. She sometimes organizes family interventions in a conference room at the Experiment Station, with as many as 11 relatives around a table, trying to address the problem together. She likes “the satisfaction of seeing someone healed.”

“I can help those cases when they have not been invested more than six months, and when they have support from loved ones or friends,” she said. “Those that have become isolated, and have developed habits of self-treatment are very hard to pull back from the brink.”

They don’t often open up at first. As the relationship develops, though, they begin to confide in Ridge. And there is usually something to confide, some emotional upheaval in the background: a divorce, a stressful move, the loss of a loved one. She saw an uptick in these cases right after the 2008 recession. After the physician-researcher’s death, she found out that his family had left him. The separation had happened right around the time of his first bites.

“Every state has somebody like Gale or me,” says Nancy Hinkle, a professor of veterinary entomology at the University of Georgia. She estimates that these inquiries take up about 20 percent of her time. “I tend to stay a couple of hours every day to deal with the invisible bugs.”

One unseasonably warm day in late January, Ridge was in her lab showing me videos of a particularly gregarious colony of bedbugs when the service bell rang on her front desk. Waiting for her was a white-haired woman in a puffy coat, wool scarf, and black-framed glasses. When she spoke, her words were halting. “I need some help,” she said, pausing, as though afraid to continue, “identifying a bug that is not allowed in my house.”

“OK, that’s what I’m here for,” said Ridge. Her wry tone was gone; instead she sounded like a kindergarten teacher, her voice an octave higher than usual and almost aggressively chipper.

The woman looked like she could use the comfort — and maybe a strong drink. “I only hope it isn’t a cockroach,” she said, sitting down.

Ridge took the container that the woman had brought in, and tipped its contents into a plate. Out fell a jumble of spiny legs, antennae, folded up wings. Ridge fiddled with the microscope and the bugs came into focus on the attached screen.

“Hi, guys,” said Ridge in the same bright voice, as the insects began to untangle themselves. Then, she added, under her breath, “They’re just scared out of their minds.”

“Well, they should be!” the woman said. “They should stay out of my house!”

The woman’s house had been completely bug-free for 30 years, she said. But then, just before Christmas, she had found one of these red-and-black critters in her living room. She found another the week after — and another, and another. She was worried they might be cockroaches. She’d gotten new furniture; could that be the culprit?

No, Ridge said. They weren’t cockroaches, and they hadn’t come in on the furniture. These were box elder bugs, she explained. They feed primarily on the seeds of the female box elder tree. Sometimes, in winter, instead of hiding out in rock crevices or tree hollows, they find their way into the warmth of people’s houses. They were harmless. No need for insecticides.

“They don’t bite?”

“Nope.”

“Do they carry disease?”

“Nope.”

Under the microscope — and, simultaneously, on the screen — the bugs began to scrape their dusty black legs along their beaks, the arthropod equivalent of washing one’s face.

Ridge took her time elucidating every aspect of the case. She drew a diagram of where the woman’s house might need caulking, read aloud and then printed out official information about box elder bugs and their host trees, and suggested a broom and dustpan for pre-caulking bug-removal. No, there was no risk of them being transported on her shoes and infecting anyone else’s house, Ridge said. No, she was under no obligation to inform anyone else that she had a bug problem.

Through pursed lips, the woman let out a sound of relief: “Well, that’s wonderful. Boy, I never thought I’d say that it’s wonderful if I identify a bug in my house.”

After she’d left, and Ridge had let the bugs out into the grass outside, she walked back toward the bedbugs and cockroaches in her lab.

“Did you see how her demeanor was at the beginning?” she said. “Tense, to say the least. And then as she began to get more educated ... how it completely lifted, this mantle of anxiety?”

The bugs that had been tormenting this woman were real. They were made of chitin and myofibrils and hemolymph if not quite flesh and blood; they crawled, felt warmth, ate seeds with their piercing-sucking mouthparts. But it wasn’t hard to see how this creature could potentially shape-shift in her mind, from a harmless half-inch garden-dweller to something much more sinister: an uncontrollable swarm. Already, these few bugs had taken up residence in her thoughts. That could happen to anyone.

And Ridge knew just how fragile the boundary could be between the insects in someone’s house and the ghostly insects of the mind. She knew better than to point out that the woman was sitting right beside a tankful of Madagascar hissing cockroaches, their sleek, segmented bodies dozing a foot or two away from her left shoulder, waiting harmlessly for nightfall. “Insects are most often not the problem,” she said.

The problem is us.

© 2017 STAT. All rights reserved.

An emerging tool in the fight against tick-borne disease, host-targeted bait boxes employ a sneaky trick: turning some of ticks’ favorite carriers — small mammals like mice and chipmunks — against them. And a new study in the Journal of Medical Entomology shows an improved design has made such bait boxes an increasingly viable addition to integrated tick management practices.

Mice, chipmunks and other small mammals are common hosts for the blacklegged tick (Ixodes scapularis), providing the ticks a home, food source, and means of spreading, all in one. Host-targeted bait boxes take the common rodent bait box design and add an extra element: a cloth wick soaked in tick-killing insecticide that the animal must contact on its way in and out of the box. Ticks that subsequently attach to the animal die after exposure to the insecticide.

Such bait boxes have been in production since 2002, but early designs left them prone to damage by squirrels and other large animals. In 2012, a new version, the SELECT Tick Control System (TCS) was introduced by Tick Box Technology Corporation, Norwalk, Conn., featuring a two-piece metal cover to prevent such damage. That improvement appears to have greatly increased their viability, according to researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Tick-borne Disease Program of Monmouth County, New Jersey, who helped test the SELECT TCS boxes.

Tick Box Technology Corporation/Yale School of Public Health/Wendolyn Hill

Their study, published in the Journal of Medical Entomology, shows that the host-targeted tick control boxes significantly reduced the prevalence of ticks on residential properties where they were deployed. After four nine-week deployments, two each conducted in 2012 and 2013, tick abundance was reduced 97 percent in 2014 on treated properties.

The researchers deployed the bait boxes on 12 residential, woodland-adjacent properties in Ocean and Monmouth counties in New Jersey in 2012 and 10 properties in 2013. After placing the boxes, they returned periodically to measure whether and how many of the boxes had been visited by animals. Before and after the test periods, they also trapped mice and chipmunks to measure their tick infestations, on both the treated properties and on untreated land for comparison. The researchers also collected tick samples on the treated and untreated properties, before and after deployment of the bait boxes, to measure tick prevalence.

Because host-targeted bait boxes affect ticks in their larval and nymphal life stages, the method takes longer to affect tick populations than other management methods, the researchers note. And they also suggest further research is needed to measure the optimal density of boxes and their specific effect on the prevalence of disease such as Lyme and babesiosis in ticks and hosts.

But, the results of this study are promising, the study concludes. “SELECT TCS appears to offer an effective alternative, delayed efficacy notwithstanding, to the use of area application of acaricide in residential situations.”

We know that humans have been competing with insects for millions of years as indicated by fossils, fables and forensic science. Early humans adapted to using layers of clothing and setting up indoor living accommodations, or caves, to protect themselves and their possessions from insects. These principles of human harborage have evolved into the free-standing structures we know today, but the hope of building out insects is still present. According to the United States Department of Agriculture, we compete daily with insects for food, fiber and forestry products. In our homes, termites are one of the more prevalent threats. Advances in the use of physical barriers to effectively exclude subterranean termites have made it possible to add new dimensions to integrated pest management (IPM) strategies for both pre-construction and post-construction implementations. For more than 20 years we have been evaluating physical and chemical barriers against termites and other structural and household pests. Products such as particulate barrier systems have applications on the exterior of structures, and in and around interior plumbing penetrations. Sealants, membranes and wire meshes can be used as effective barriers to invading insect populations at the soil, concrete slab, veneer interfaces, as well as soffit and roof areas. Development of elastomeric membranes and advances in their use provides opportunities for pest management professionals to effectively solve problems with cracked slabs, cold joints and other construction abnormalities, which in the past have resulted in the incursion of pest populations. Sustainable building practice is the use of environmentally responsible processes that are resource-efficient. These are not new concepts, but hold a great deal of promise in ensuring the building is efficient during design and construction, as well as in operation and maintenance for the life of the structure.

It is known that there are several requisites for life that are required for animals, such as insects, to survive. Heterotrophs must harvest food for energy and growth and have access to oxygen to be successful. Additionally, water, a favorable environment that provides the appropriate temperature and humidity, shelter from elements, and others of the same species to advance the population are required for success of an organism. To effectively control a pest population, reducing or eliminating access to any of these conducive conditions is key. Use of sustainable building practices in an IPM program results in effective pest exclusion with long-term efficacy. Building materials used in this type of control are environmentally sound and generally require little maintenance.

AN AGGREGATE BARRIER. One material that is at the forefront of pest exclusion, without the use of pesticides, is an aggregate barrier. These also are referred to as particulate termite barriers and are made up of specifically-sized aggregate. Particulate termite barriers have been widely and successfully used in other parts of the world since the 1980s. However, they have never been commercially available in the mainland United States. The principle behind particle barriers has been well researched by Ebeling and Pence (1957)¹, Su et al. (1991)², Su and Scheffrahn (1992)³, Yates et al. (2003)⁵ and Keefer et al. (2013)⁴. Research with particle barriers for the mainland United States was initiated at Texas A&M University in 2003 at the request of a Texas pest control professional. Various particle characteristics were evaluated, including size, angularity and interstitial space between particles. Results showed that a particle blend of aggregate sieve sizes 8, 10 and 12, as well as a mean angularity of 3200+ and 40% interstitial space, was most effective against tunneling subterranean termites⁴. This material is generally installed in a wedge formation that measures 4 inches across and 5 inches down, directly against the foundation. Particle barriers were initially installed in 15 homes in South Texas in 2005. Each of the homes were infested with subterranean termites prior to the start of the experiment. Homes in this study were monitored for 10 years and the pest control professional monitoring reported no occurrences of termites during this field evaluation. Particle barriers were then reduced to practice in seven Texas homes in 2015. Each structure was initially infested with termites, but to date, none have shown evidence that termites have breached the particle barrier. Aggregate barriers have also shown success when installed in bath traps or slab leave-outs. During construction and after the foundation is poured, cardboard and other debris is removed from bath trap areas and the particle barrier is installed. Application of this material protects the structure from termite intrusion in these vulnerable areas. Implementation of particle barriers has expanded across the United States and serves as a reliable supplementation to termiticide use around new and existing structures.

The building envelope is a physical barrier between the interior and exterior of a structure that has been proven to keep energy in and environmental elements out. Each of these materials are upgrades to the building envelope that have shown to keep termites and other pests out. The goal of these types of materials is to build out pests with sustainable systems and exclude pests for the life of the structure. Each of the pest exclusion materials discussed herein are free of pesticides and are classified as “devices” or barriers by regulators. Integrated pest management tactics employ the use of physical and mechanical barriers to control pests, along with chemical, biological and cultural, or sanitation, methods. In addition, federal and state governments emphasize sustainable systems as part of sound and effective IPM programs. An example of such initiative would be NPMA’s QualityPro Certification Program, a service option and certification developed by the National Pest Management Association that is awarded to companies that provide service options that are least-risk to people, property and the environment.

References:

¹Ebeling, W.J. and R.J. Pence. 1957. Relation of particle size to the penetration of subterranean termites through barriers of sand and cinders. J. Econ. Entomol. 50: 690-692.

²Su, N.-Y., R.H. Scheffrahn, and P.M. Ban. 1991. Uniform size particle barrier: a physical exclusion device against subterranean termites (Isoptera: Rhinotermitidae). J. Econ. Entomol. 84: 912-916.

³Su, N.-Y. and R.H. Scheffrahn. 1992. Penetration of sized-particle barriers by field populations of subterranean termites (Isoptera: Rhinotermitidae). J. Econ. Entomol. 85: 2275-2278.

⁴T. Chris Keefer, Dan G. Zollinger, and Roger E. Gold. 2013. Evaluation of aggregate particles as a physical barrier to prevent subterranean termite incursion into structures. Southwest. Entomol. 38: 447–464.

⁵Yates, J.R., J.K. Grace, and J.N. Reinhardt. 2003. Installation guidelines for the Basaltic Termite Barrier: a particle barrier to Formosan subterranean termites (Summary). Sociobiology 41: 113-114.

Krejci is lead research & technical sales associate for Polyguard Products’ TERM Barrier Division. Gold is former professor and endowed chair for Urban and Structural Entomology at Texas A&M University.

The approach to opening a pest control business doesn’t always have to start with knowledge of rats, roaches and scorpions. A company can start from a completely different perspective, in this case marketing, and be highly successful.

David Marshall and Amy Bobbitt are the husband and wife co-owners of Arizona Pest Squad, Tempe, Ariz., which provides integrated pest management services to customers in the metro-Phoenix area. And they took a completely different approach when they came into the business.

MARKETING MATTERS. Instead of coming from the technical, “bug side” of the industry, Arizona Pest Squad approached their business from a marketing perspective, primarily based on what Marshall learned during his diverse career and having lived in some of the country’s largest cities. His background includes being a model, an actor and a top-selling car salesperson. Most prominently, and what is likely the greatest influence on the approach used to establish and grow their pest control business, is his work in the music industry. He followed in his father’s footsteps in the industry and became a successful promoter. “Every independent record I worked on came in No. 1,” said Marshall.

“There may be others who know more about bugs, pests and chemicals. What we saw was a lack of partnering with clients to help them solve their pest problems,” said Bobbitt.

“I believe what the industry is sometimes missing is realizing the importance of building customer relationships instead of routes,” said Marshall. “We know where we fit in the marketplace. We’re all about customer service and responsiveness.”

STEADY COMPANY GROWTH. Arizona Pest Squad has grown steadily since PCT included the company as one of 25 companies to watch in 2013.

“We have more customers than we can handle,” said Bobbitt. “We can always use more technicians.” The company continuously looks for PMPs to fill their needs. There’s so much business, in fact, they refer termite, bird and weed work to trusted technical partners, because they “can’t expand fast enough.”

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“We’ve had double-digit growth every year since we started the business in 2011. We would be even larger if we had the infrastructure to service more customers,” said Bobbitt. “We’ve grown as a result of our great customer service.”

“We opened the business with the intent of building a strong customer base — a sticky customer base,” said Marshall. “We’re not interested in simply adding routes. Our forte is bringing in customers and providing great customer service. We don’t compete on prices. We haven’t had to since we’re providing such a positive customer experience.”

LIFESTYLE MARKETING. Using what Marshall refers to as “lifestyle marketing,” Arizona Pest Squad makes customer service and building relationships their highest priority. “It’s about creating a customer experience,” said Marshall. “I believe any type of one-on-one with a customer to be lifestyle marketing. It’s understanding their life and what’s going on.”

Customers prefer predictability and consistency and Arizona Pest Squad delivers. “When you look at some companies, a guy shows up, sprays, leaves a piece of paper and the customer doesn’t even know what he did,” said Marshall. “We don’t send a different technician to an existing account. They wouldn’t know what’s going on. They don’t have the history with the customer. So we do our best to send the same person every time, because the customer already knows and trusts him. We also meet every morning to talk about the day’s jobs,” said Marshall.

“We always cover the details of each of the day’s service calls as a refresher. That includes anything that’s important or unique to the customer, such as they have an old dog or a child. It’s all to help build a relationship,” added Bobbitt.

TAKE THE TIME. “We believe in spending time with the customer,” said Marshall. “We take the time to walk them to the truck — which is always clean — show them the state-of-the art equipment we use, and explain the products we use — which are all name brands — and why. Then we go back to the house and I show them how the equipment would be used in their home. We don’t walk them through the house and sell them. We’re explaining to them what they’re buying. During the process the homeowner is going to naturally share the pest problems they’re having. When you explain how you’re doing something and why, you’re demonstrating that you’re a professional.”

Taking time with the client may also uncover what a customer did to address their pest problems before calling you. “Were they trying DIY methods? Did they have a bad experience with another company? Or did no one show up for a service call?” asked Marshall.

To help prospects make a purchasing decision, Marshall shares his credentials. “We’ll go to their laptop and I’ll show them our license and our CEUs to demonstrate continued training. We’re showing them that this is why you should hire us,” said Marshall.

CUSTOMER PARTNERSHIPS. “We partner with our customers and make them part of the process. Customers are a big part of the solution. We’re a team,” explained Marshall. “We also talk about what they need to do differently to help eliminate the problem. We give clients assignments to prep before treatment. And, most importantly, we talk about what they need to do after a treatment.”

“We also help clients find DIY solutions if they don’t want to hire us. We want to educate them and help them solve their problems,” said Marshall.

SOCIAL MEDIA. “Our business has grown through social media,” explained Bobbitt. “It’s the most efficient means of marketing when you can get customers talking about your company for you.”

“Social media is very important,” said Marshall. “Everyone’s communicating via social media. I do what they call ‘real time’ and post while I’m working on a commercial account or a rodent inspection, or I’ll post a trapped rat and explain what kind of trap I used. People want to know what you’re doing now, not yesterday or last week. Arizona Pest Squad uses a number of social media platforms to promote its business, including Facebook and Twitter.

“A lot of pest control companies are just going for Google click ads,” said Marshall. “If they used some of that budget to hire someone to manage their social media they’d reap the benefits. They’d also be stimulating the economy by hiring someone.”

The company also relies on crowd-sourced reviews published by customers. “Yelp is very important to us. I’ve heard of other companies that pay technicians for every positive Yelp review. We never ask for customers to do a Yelp review. I don’t even want to talk about the review if they mention they’re going to do one. I don’t want to get involved. You can tell the difference between a review that’s genuine and one that’s not. We also use customer responses to help improve our services,” explained Marshall.

ACCOLADES. In May 2016, Marshall was one of only eight who was awarded the Minority Business Enterprise (MBE) Advocate of the Year award by the Pacific Southwest Minority Supplier Development Council, which recognizes those who excel in growth and performance. Earlier in 2016, Arizona Pest Squad received several certifications from the City of Phoenix and the Arizona Department of Transportation, including Small Business Enterprise (SBE) and Disadvantaged Business Enterprise (DBE).

Marshall was selected as one of only 10 individuals for the 2017 inaugural class of the National Pest Management Association’s (NPMA) Executive Leadership Program (ELP). The program is a NPMA initiative that identifies ten industry professionals from across the country who receive professional development and skills training, as well as paid trips to NPMA Legislative Day and NPMA PestWorld.

Participants were selected based on a number of criteria, which included industry participation, commitment to professional development and leadership potential. The two-year curriculum focuses on cultivating skills and knowledge essential to successful leadership within NPMA and beyond.

“Participating in the Executive Leadership Program has already been a great experience and a huge opportunity,” said Marshall. “It gives me peer-to-peer contact. It’s great to be able to talk with someone who’s been through the same thing. I now have a network of companies across the nation to exchange ideas with. It makes me want to reach out to other companies and help them. I’m grateful to be part of the program and to be recognized by the largest association in the industry.”

“Most of those in the program are from big companies. We’re not a million-dollar company, but we will be,” he said.

The author is a Florida-based freelancer at Perspective Communications.