Twenty years ago, I just planned to stay for short time. But I can remember being struck by the idea of seventeen pages of the phone book dedicated solely to pest control companies. Apparently, there’s a demand. A need.
Later sold pest control. No, ma’m, I can’t do anything about your neighbor. No, this ain’t Ohio. No, this ain’t Long Island. In Florida, you are part of the food chain. Not always at the top. – JDW
Every year termites damage more USA homes than fires, tornadoes and earthquakes combined.
Miami is the termite capital of North America. Last year, Miami termites ate the equivalent of sixteen miles of eight-foot-long two-by-fours. Enough wood to build eighteen new homes.
Tampa ranked third (behind Atlanta) with eleven houses chewed up, while Orlando (following Norfolk) lost eight split-levels to the pesky critters.
Bugs are a fact of life in the subtropics. And a big business. A major preoccupation. A competitor on the food chain.
When forests and orange groves are cut down to make way for new development, the termites start looking elsewhere for wood. They don’t care if it’s a three-bedroom, two-bath with deck, boat dock and 30-year mortgage. Or a dead pine.
Food is food. Wood is wood.
DON’T FORGET YOUR COCKROACH PREVENTIVE MAINTANCE, the newspaper warns. More exterminators, we’re assured, are using natural substances in the battle against insects.
Some people still haven’t gotten the idea.
“Chemicals are not bad. Chemicals are good, if they’re used correctly,” explained a lobbyist for the Florida Pest Management And Consumer Hysteria Association. Among bugphobes, time-release capsules are popular.
A cockroach, please note, is the only life form capable of surviving a nuclear holocaust.
Bombs away.
Attention homeowners: Cockroaches love to dine in the bathroom, where they suck sweet tartar control formula out of your toothbrush.
Cockroaches carry fifty viruses, allergens and bacteria and cause tubercolis, salmonella, cholera, dysentery, intestinal round worm, hay fever, asthma and dermatitis. Not all at once, hopefully.
Now it can be told. A fertile female cockroach with libido or moral integrity of, say, Geraldo and the discretion of Jimmy Swaggart could produce as many as nine million new roaches in a single year.
Say hallelujah.