Hello and welcome to this edition of As The Guard Keep My Name is Michael Croes. I am the Chief Geek in Charge and I've been here in charge for 35 years. Are you believing that? Today I want to continue along our series of Pest and today we're going to talk about insects.
Yeah, insects. The more you know about insects, the easier it is to keep them from bothering you. And that's what we want. We don't want, I want insects to live.
I want them to be healthy. I want them to live their lifestyle. But I don't want them to bother me. I don't want them to affect my garden.
I don't want them in my house bothering me. I'm just that way. So what is an insect? Well, insects have three body parts.
They have a head, they have a thoraxxist in the middle part, and they have an abdomen. Let's talk a little bit about those body parts, shall we? Let's start off with the head. The head is going to include eyes and with most insects, and it's going to include a mouth, or in the case of insects, mouth parts.
Now, this is where things get a little weird. Some insects have what we call chewing mouth parts. They chew food. Okay, they chew leaves.
They chew grass. They chew, believe it or not, they eat dried up insect poop and they chew it. Yeah, they're insects. What do you expect?
Other insects have something like flies, for instance, have something called rasping sucking mouth parts. What are rasping sucking mouth parts? Well, it's like a big sponge, sort of. When you're out at the park and you're having a hot dog and you got the chips out in the bowl, which by the way, never put your chips in a bowl, leave them in the bag so you can reach in.
You'll know why in a minute. But you got the hot dogs out there. And you're sitting there and you're talking to your aunt who's on the other side of the table who you really don't like spending time with, but it's a family obligation. So there you are.
Anyway, you're sitting there talking to your aunt. She's irritating you. And the next thing you know, before you can take another bite out of your hot dog, a fly lands on it. He takes his, what we call, rasping mouth, rasping sucking mouth part and he sticks it on that hot dog and he goes, okay, was that a word?
Anyway, he goes, that's what he does. And when he does that, he leaves a little bit of stuff behind on the hot dog and then he tries to suck some nutrition out of the hot dog. I don't know how successful he is, but that's what they try to do. You see him landing on sandwiches.
You see him landing on all this stuff. They're very irritating. That is rasping sucking mouth parts. Now you're still at the park.
Your aunt is still bugging you to know in and it's, you know, the day's going on and it's starting to head towards dark and what comes out of dark? Mosquitoes. Now mosquitoes have a different type of mouth part. They have what's called a piercing sucking mouth part.
What does that mean? Well, that means they have a little stylus like at the end of their, their mouth and they inject that into your skin and they suck out your blood. That's what they do. And it's, it's gross and it's irritating, but that's what it is.
And that is that type of a mouth part. Then you've got your chewing, you've got your rasping sucking and your piercing sucking. So that's all in the head. Then you have the thorax.
A lot happens in the thorax. First of all, we should talk about blood. Okay, we have our circulatory systems that we have as people in my cat has and your dog has and everybody that you know has is called a closed circulatory system. We have a heart and we have arteries and we have veins and all of our blood goes through all of that stuff.
It's pumped in our heart, goes through the arteries and into the veins. It's really cool. Insects don't have that. Insects have something called an open circulatory system.
By the way, the other thing that's missing in the head of the insect is a brain. They don't have a brain back to the thorax. Even that thorax is like an open area and on the back of the insect is a nerve that goes all the way down from the head all the way to the butt to the abdomen. And that is kind of like a main nerve.
Underneath the insect on the bottom of that thorax are little tiny holes. They are called spiracles. Now that is how they take in their air and also in there. We'll get back to the air in just a minute.
Also in there is their version of a heart which is kind of like a bilge pump. It just goes go, and it shoots the fluid that's inside the abdomen back and forth. And when it shoots that back and forth, I remember I told you about the little spiracles underneath there that the insect breathes on. Well, they're connected to little tiny tubes called tracheas.
And when the insect's nerves that goes down its back makes the bilge pump work and air is sucked in through the spiracles and it goes through the trachea. And then that just keeps the insect alive. And the insect instinctively goes and eats either by rasping and sucking, piercing sucking, or chewing. So we know all of that.
Then we got the back end of the insect that's called the abdomen. That's what happens there. Yeah, they poop, all that stuff that they eat. They just poop it out through the abdomen.
Now it's a little bit more complicated and all that, but this is basically what's going on in there. It's not terribly complicated like people, but it is there and it's efficient and it works. By the way, if you ever have like the big roaches in your house and you see the little roach poop, yeah, like coming right out of their abdomen. So now how do we control an insect?
Well there's different ways to control an insect. One way to control an insect is what we call mechanical control. That is where you get a brick and you convince the insect to climb up on the brick and then you take the second brick and you set it on top of the first brick while the insect is there. That is mechanical control.
Exclusion is another one. You make the area where you are, a place where insects cannot be. And modern day houses are pretty well sealed up and it's hard for insects to get in. They find a way, but it's difficult because those are exclusionary things and that's a good idea.
And then there's chemical control and when I say pesticide control, that is either an organic pesticide or a chemical pesticide. I like organics. And when we get into that, there's different types. Now an insect with a chewing mouth part might be interested in eating a bait.
And there's lots of baits out there. There's baits for ants. There's baits for cockroaches. There's baits for termites.
There's baits for all kinds of insects. There's baits for flies. And you put those baits down where the insects hang out, they eat it and then they eat it and it gets into their gut down there and it stops the trachea from taking in air and disrupts the nerve and then they just die. It's pretty cool.
Pretty cool. Then there's other ways you can get insecticide into the insect. Now I left out a part of the insect. They have wings on their back.
Now some insects fly. Some don't fly, but they still have wings. Those wings besides being vehicles of flight are also vehicles shielding the insect. If the insect's crawling around, you see a road crawling around, it has wings and it's doing that.
And you go and you get the raid and you spray it on the insect. Well a lot of the times the wings will prevent that raid if you don't spray too much from getting into the insect and killing it. Isn't that interesting? That chemical applications, if you put a pesticide where insects are, be it on a plant, on a floor, on a wall, on a base board, underneath a saint, wherever in the ground, in the case of termites, that insect will come in contact with it and it will work its way through the skin of the insect and also through the spiracles.
And once it gets into the spiracles and gets into the trachea and into the circulation system, the nerve stops working the insect dies. That's just the way that you do that. Fumigants are another way to kill insecticides. And that is where, you know, through the spiracles, the insect is sucking up toxins, which will, you know, in by the way, organic fumigants, such as pyrethums, work very effectively and they go through the spiracles and kill the insect that way.
So it's best to know, now a lot of insects, by the way, have built up resistance to different pesticides. So that is something else to be aware of. And there are, you know, with insecticides, there are what we call repellent insecticides, which keep insects away, which is a good thing. But it's also a bad thing if you have insects and you spray a repellent insecticide down.
And the insects instinctively go around it and stay in a house. So then there's non repellent insecticides. The insects don't know it's there and they go through it and it affects them and then they die. So the more you know about insects, the more successful you're going to be.
And now I've given you a very basic class on how insects are and how we kill them. Have a great day. You've been listening to this session.