Pest Control in Ravenna

There is nothing wrong with your house. We say that on nearly every visit to Ravenna, which sits on the escarpment top in The Blue Mountains in open agricultural country above the valley, and it is the clearest example in our whole area of a pest problem created entirely by what surrounds a building rather than by anything the building is doing.

That matters more than it sounds. People up here spend money sealing and cleaning a house that was never the source, and the flies arrive again the following October exactly on schedule.

Why cluster flies are worse here than anywhere else we go

Cluster flies develop on earthworms in undisturbed soil. Pasture and orchard ground is close to perfect for that, and a house here typically has several hundred metres of it in every direction. A house in a Collingwood subdivision has a lawn and a neighbour.

Then the second factor: exposure. An isolated building on high open ground catches full sun on its south and west walls in October and there is nothing to shade or shelter it. Those warm walls are the aggregation surface, and the flies arriving at them come from the whole surrounding acreage rather than from a garden.

Timing beats product, every year

The exterior treatment has to be on the wall before the flies arrive, and they arrive on the first warm afternoons after the first genuinely cold nights. That is a weather event, not a date. Treating in November is treating an empty wall, and treating indoors in February kills the few that woke up while several thousand sleep on in the wall void.

Cluster fly and mouse control on an escarpment-top property

The same open ground that supplies the flies supplies the mice, and the same exposed walls take both. One September visit that treats the perimeter and closes the entries handles the pair of them; two separate calls in November handles neither well. See cluster flies and fall invaders.