Month: July 2026

Businesses used to think of pest problems as seasonal. Ants in spring. Mosquitoes in summer. Rodents in fall. That calendar is not gone, but it is less reliable.

Warmer winters, longer warm seasons, heavier rain events, and sudden temperature swings are changing pest behavior in ways that directly affect commercial properties. For businesses, that shift creates more pressure on sanitation, customer experience, employee safety, compliance, and reputation. The CDC has noted that longer summers, milder winters, and extreme weather are helping mosquitoes, ticks, and rodents expand into new areas, and that the pathogens they carry are following.

Pest control can no longer be treated as a reaction after something shows up, which is why at Catseye the goal is to get in front of the issue. Climate shifts are making prevention more important, and businesses that ignore that reality are taking on more risk than they realize.

Why Climate Shifts Matter for Commercial Pest Control

Warmer Winters Help More Pests Survive

Hard freezes naturally reduce pest populations. When winters are milder, more insects and rodents survive into spring and do so with a head start. Businesses tend to see more overwintering pests, earlier spring activity, larger breeding populations, and more frequent sightings from employees and customers.

A mild winter may feel like a break for your heating bill. It can also be a head start for pests.

Longer Warm Seasons Create Longer Pest Seasons

Warmer average temperatures extend the active season for mosquitoes, ticks, flies, ants, cockroaches, and stored-product pests. Outdoor dining areas face longer mosquito and fly pressure. Warehouses and food facilities deal with more insect activity later into the year. Hotels and multifamily properties field more complaints. The EPA has tied warmer conditions specifically to longer seasons for disease vectors including mosquitoes, ticks, and fleas, pests that are now showing up in areas where they were historically rare.

The Biggest Climate-Driven Pest Pressures Businesses Are Facing

Rodents Moving Indoors After Weather Extremes

Heavy rain, flooding, drought, and sudden cold snaps can push rodents out of their normal nesting areas and toward commercial buildings. Restaurants, grocery stores, food processing facilities, warehouses, hospitals, schools, and multifamily properties are all at elevated risk. Rodents follow food, warmth, water, and shelter. Dumpster areas, loading docks, wall voids, and utility penetrations are common entry points, and small gaps become big liabilities fast.

A restaurant does not need a full-scale rodent infestation to lose customer trust. One mouse sighting near a dining area can turn into photos, reviews, and health department attention.

Mosquitoes Expanding Their Season and Range

Changing rainfall patterns create more standing water and more breeding opportunities. Outdoor seating becomes less comfortable. Employees working outside face more exposure. Hospitality, recreation, golf, property management, and event venues may see more complaints. Drainage inspections, stormwater management, and proactive monitoring around outdoor guest areas are all becoming more important, not just in summer, but across a longer window of the year.

Beyond Rodents and Mosquitoes

Climate-driven pressure is not limited to the obvious pests. Ticks have expanded well beyond wooded residential areas into landscaped commercial campuses, school grounds, golf courses, and healthcare properties. Cockroaches and flies thrive in heat and humidity, and for food facilities and restaurants, they are not just a nuisance but a direct threat to inspections, food safety, and trust. Shifts in rainfall patterns also drive moisture pests like ants, silverfish, centipedes, and earwigs indoors, particularly after heavy storms or extended drought. The common thread is unpredictability: pest activity is becoming harder to anticipate using old seasonal assumptions.

Why Reactive Pest Control Is No Longer Enough

Reactive pest control means waiting until the problem is visible. Climate-driven pressure makes that approach risky.

By the time pests are seen, they may already be established. A single sighting can damage customer confidence. Commercial properties have more entry points than homes, and constant foot traffic, deliveries, landscaping, and food sources create ongoing pressure. For regulated industries such as restaurants, food processing, healthcare, senior living, and schools, inspections and documentation matter as much as treatment, and in some cases disinfection services may be warranted before a facility can return to normal operations. Health and safety exposure, reputation damage, compliance violations, and operational disruptions are all downstream consequences of a pest plan that starts after something is spotted.

If your pest plan starts after someone sees a pest, your business is already behind.

What Businesses Should Do Differently Now

Start with an honest review of your property’s pest vulnerabilities under current conditions, not old assumptions. Entry points, moisture issues, drainage, landscaping edges, dumpster zones, loading docks, and storage areas should all be on that list.

Tighten Exclusion and Environmental Controls

Exclusion is one of the most important commercial prevention steps. Sealing gaps and cracks, installing door sweeps and dock seals, screening vents, and addressing roofline openings all reduce the opportunities pests have to get inside. Moisture control matters just as much. Fix leaks, improve drainage, clean gutters, address standing water, and watch condensation in food and storage areas. Climate shifts often mean more intense rain events followed by drought stress, and both conditions push pests toward buildings.

Build a Year-Round Commercial Pest Management Plan

Sanitation and pest management are not separate functions. Dumpster cleaning, trash pickup frequency, food debris control, spill response, and storage rotation all directly affect pest pressure. Pair strong sanitation with regular inspections, seasonal risk planning, monitoring devices, trend reporting, and fast response when activity is detected. The Global Food Safety Initiative has noted that rising temperatures and longer seasons create more favorable conditions for pests in food processing and storage, and that documentation and prevention planning are the appropriate response.

The Bottom Line

Climate shifts are not creating a brand-new pest problem. They are making the existing problem harder to predict, easier to miss, and more expensive to ignore. Businesses that treat pest control as a seasonal checklist will fall behind. Those that inspect, exclude, monitor, and plan year-round will be better protected.

If your property is seeing more pest activity, more customer complaints, or more pressure around your building, it may be time to rethink your approach. Catseye’s commercial pest control programs are built for exactly this kind of ongoing, prevention-first protection. Reach out to schedule a facility inspection and build a plan before pests become a public problem.

The post How Climate Shifts Are Changing Pest Pressure on Businesses appeared first on Catseye Pest Control.

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Inertia is a property whereby objects in motion tend to stay in motion and objects at rest tend to stay at rest. One of the finest examples of inertia is the inexorable annual disappearance of evergreens down the gullets of bagworms. Bagworms are objects in motion. Sometimes, as I witnessed recently, property owners are too often objects at rest. Here’s why. Last week I stopped by my favorite coffee shop and as I sipped, I noticed a peculiar aberration in a lovely planting of arborvitaes lining the parking lot. Smack in the middle of the row of emerald beauties was one decidedly ugly brown rogue. Victim of too much mulch, too little water, or girdling plastic around the root ball, perhaps? Nah, a closer examination revealed hundreds of tiny bagworm caterpillars whose busy jaws were shredding foliage, transforming the evergreen to ever brown.  

Populations of bagworms seem to be on the rise again in the DMV. Whether it’s favorable weather, a dearth of natural enemies, climate change, or just bad luck, bagworms have returned in force to many places in our region. Bagworms have been reported to feed on more than 100 species of plants in our area. They are most damaging to evergreens such as juniper, spruce, arborvitae, pine, and Leyland cypress; however, they will consume a wide variety of deciduous trees and shrubs with equal gusto. Complete defoliation of an evergreen such as pine, arborvitae, or spruce can kill the tree in a single season. Deciduous trees such as sycamore or maple are much more tolerant of this abuse, as they may be able to produce new leaves if defoliation has not occurred too late in the season. If you have bagworms on your plants, especially evergreens, you may be in deep trouble as you read this story. But if your conifers are not yet knocking on heaven’s door, this is a good time to save them for years to come. 

Oh no, what’s up with this brown arborvitae? Hundreds of tiny bagworm caterpillars, that’s what. Some are dining on foliage, others are adding silk to their bag from silk glands on their mouth, others are relocating their shelter, and some are just hiding from the camera. In another month or so, tiny caterpillars will be more than an inch long, performing aerial acrobatics as they move about. Left unchecked, this is what bagworms will do to an evergreen tree, sorrow and death may await these evergreens.

The bagworm is named for its curious habit of carrying about its refuge, a bag woven of silk and plant parts. Back in May, eggs of bagworms completed their development inside overwintered bags dangling on trees. Tiny caterpillars hatched and emerged from the bottom of the bag. Some stayed put on their natal plant while others ballooned on silken threads to other plants nearby. Caterpillars construct and enlarge their bags as they grow. People sometimes confuse the bagworm’s bag with a plant part such as a pinecone. This makes detection a problem. However, a closer look at the bag, especially on a warm summer’s day, often reveals the head and legs of the caterpillar as it moves about eating leaves or needles. By late summer, larvae complete their development, securely attach their bags to twigs with silken threads, and pupate within the bags.

After a few weeks, the male bagworm, a black moth with clear wings, emerges from his bag and flies to find a mate. The female, a maggot-like wingless sack of eggs, releases a pheromone, a sex attractant, to lure the male to her bag. After attracting her mate, the female bagworm does not emerge to greet him. Instead, she remains in her bag, hidden from her mate during the conjugal visit. After mating, she lays from several hundred to more than 1,000 eggs in the bag, and then, like a tragic Greek heroine, she dies, leaving her eggs behind to hatch next spring.  

If bagworms are no longer actively feeding or moving, the damage is done and applying insect sprays is useless. So, don’t do that. However, if large bagworms are still active, it is not too late to nip next year’s incipient bagworm explosion in the bud. Removing bags by hand can be very effective in halting an outbreak, so put on a pair of gloves, grab a garbage bag, and start pickin’. As you remove the bagworms, be sure to collect them in a container or bag, seal it tightly, and dispose of them. Do not simply toss bagworms on the ground or in the driveway. Displaced bagworms are relentless and they will return, crawl up your tree, and resume their feast. If offending bagworms have completed development in late summer or early autumn, you can dramatically reduce the population next year by removing the egg-laden bags now. 

Returning to the present, what can be done now to reduce the carnage? Large numbers of tiny bagworms may be too numerous to be picked by hand. If the caterpillars are small, you may be able to control them with a thorough application of an insecticide such as biologically based, Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt). Some formulations of Bt are listed by the Organic Material Research Institute (OMRI) as safe to use in the production of organic foods you purchase in the market. Bt works well on small caterpillars. If caterpillars are larger, an insecticide containing the OMRI listed, reduced risk active ingredient called spinosad works well to control bagworms. 

Remember, as we approach the middle through the end of August in the DMV, bagworms will have completed their development and sprays on foliage will not kill pupae, adults, or eggs. Physical removal is your best alternative from late summer until May of next year. Sometimes natural enemies including birds, wasps, and voracious predatory bugs kill enough bagworms to quell an outbreak, but I would not count on it. Take stock of your bagworm situation, make a plan, and snap to it! 

Acknowledgements 

Information for this Bug of the Week came from “Managing Insects and Mites on Woody Landscape Plants: An IPM Approach” by J. A. Davidson and M. J. Raupp. For more information on bagworms check out the following website: https://extension.umd.edu/resource/bagworms-trees-and-shrubs/

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