01 Intro

Hello, this is Frank Meek, Orkin International Technical and Training Director. And welcome to your initial training for your new Orkin Franchise. The purpose of this video is to give you the basic information that you will need before attending your training here in Atlanta. During this session, we will cover an introduction to pest control which we will discuss why our business actually exists. We'll discuss some of the general rules if you will, of the approach that we take the pest management called integrated pest management or IPM. And then we'll discuss and cover some of the basic biologies and habits of the most common pests that we find around the world, cockroaches, ants, flies, and rodents. This will prepare you for your time here in Atlanta with us to complete your training. So we'll start first with an introduction to pest control. Now the introduction, the reason we want to do an introduction to pest control is simply to help you understand why it is that our business actually exists in the world. Our business does three things or four things, pardon me. Our business does four things in the world to help people. We do, we provide public health, we provide food safety, structural protection, and animal health. And we'll touch on each of these individually, but these are really the four primary reasons that our industry exists is to is to help people with these four things. Let's take a look at the first one, public health. Pests have the ability to carry a number of diseases, and we'll discuss that in a little more detail later. But these diseases are certainly potentially harmful to not only us but to our animals and to nature in general. There are two ways that pests spread disease, there are primary vectors, vector meaning to carry something. So there can be primary vectors, ones that directly carry a disease organism, and in fact a person or an animal through a bite or through contact. And then there are secondary vectors, which are methods of transmitting diseases without actually touching us. So leaving bacterium, viral compounds on surfaces that we then touch and take into our system, public health also is related to the famine problems in the world. Pest destroy up to 48% are the latest estimates of all of the world's food supply before we can touch it. So almost half of the food that is created in this world, whether in the field or in processing, is destroyed and damaged by pest before we can ever touch it. Now just think for a moment, that's with all of our best efforts, 48%, half of the food supply has lost. If we could improve the way that we provide pest management services by simply 10%, what effect do we have on the world as a whole at allowing food to get out to people that really need it. It's our job, it's that important. And we have to think of our jobs in those ways. Now famine certainly goes hand-in-hand with food safety which is the second reason that our industry exists. A food safety is really a huge problem. It's a growing concern globally with standards such as the Global Food Safety Initiative, the Safe Quality Food initiatives that are started in much of the world, and have spread now across most of the globe. That these programs were designed to try to make sure that food is safe for human consumption. Pests come into this situation because pests provide contamination. They provide biological contamination, biological certainly from leaving parts of their bodies, hair, fecal matter, and that sort of thing, but also through the bacteria and the viral compounds that they can place inside the food. Pests also contaminate material physically. We can open a bag of grain or rice or beans or something and many times find the actual pests themselves living inside these products. So there's biological and physical contaminations that occur. And then there's also the destruction of the material as well. Rodents, as an example, will chew through a bag of material. They may urinate or defecate, drop their feces on the top of a pallet of bags. If you have a pallet of material, let's say that it contains 30 or 40, 50 kilo bags of grain. And a rodent walks on top of that pallet and urinates or release fecal pellets, technically that entire pallet of goods is ruined and should be destroyed, because there's no way of knowing how far the contamination actually exist inside that stack of grain. So that's one of the reasons why that number, that 48% is so high. It's because one contaminant can effect an entire amount of material. Now the third reason that our business exists is certainly to protect structures, we protect structures from animals, insects as well as other, as well as vertebrates, residential structures as well as commercial structures. There is direct damage caused by some of these creatures through gnawing such as from rodents, rodents chew a lot, and all the time to help them gain access into areas. And that gnawing is actually as you know very damaging to the structure. There is consumption that occurs. Some insects such as termites actually can consume the wood. There is excavating. We know that ants, some species of ants love to hollow out the soil underneath concrete. When that concrete is hollow underneath it, when the ground is gone underneath the concrete, it can fall in. So excavating the earth out from underneath the structures can cause structural weakness and so forth. Now, those are ways that pests can primarily damage or directly damage structures. They can cause secondary problems through things like fire, water exposure, structural weakness. It's estimated in some areas that many of the fires as much is half of the fires in the world of unknown origin can probably be related or contributed to rodents. Rodents like to chew on those electrical wires. If they short them out, fire can happen. If a structural's integrity has been damaged, water can come in, which causes weakness and direct damage from the water exposure. So we protect people's structures, their homes, and their businesses from these pest as well, because of these things. Animal health is the fourth reason that our business exists. Protecting people's domestic animals, their pets, their dogs, their cats, but also animals for profit, and by animals for profit what we mean are things like cattle, sheep, horses, camels, animals that are grown to resell for food, for sports, for what have you. So we protect these animals as well because they have a direct tie into the economy. Pests are very important in keeping under control for these animals. For example, in a cattle or horse stall, if rodents are out of control, they are consuming the feed that's meant for the animals. If the feed is not there, the animal doesn't necessarily grow and develop the way that it should, so that it can bring the maximum amount of profit for the business. It's also been shown that if houseflies are infesting a dairy barn, for example, the amount of milk that can be produced from the cows actually decreases because they are putting their energy into swatting flies away, instead of creating the milk. Now in domestic animals, of course, we know that pests, some insects can spread diseases to our dogs, our cats, our pets, things like mosquitoes can bite our dogs, our cats, inject heartworms into the dogs and cause problem. Ticks can spread diseases to the animals, and they can also then leave the animal and come to us and spread those diseases as well. So protecting the animals is the fourth reason why our business exists. Now these are all very important things, and we should keep that in mind as we're setting up our business, hiring our employees, and talking to our employees. See, most of the world out there thinks that the pest controller is just the guy that walks around and sprays chemical. That's what they think our job is, spray chemical, kill some cockroaches. Now we know, because of these things we just spoke about the importance of our job is more than just spraying chemical and killing a few cockroaches. It's protecting the environment, it's protecting the communities that we live and work in, protecting the public health, protecting the food supply, protecting people structures, and protecting the animals that we depend on for our companionship and our livelihood in some cases. So our job is extremely important, and we have to remember that and think about that all the time. Now let's talk a little bit about the pests themselves, just some general things about the pests. So in order to really do our job and deliver those four things to the communities that we live and work in, we have to understand a little bit about our enemy. We have to know some of the things that they do, we have to know some of the things that they want to do. Our entire approach to service is based on the biologies and the habits of the pests. So I want to introduce you to pest in general, in just over just a few slides here. Now every animal on this earth is classified through a system called taxonomy. Now I pulled out just one because every animal has the set up as you see on the screen, but this is the set up for the common bedbug. Now we know what is the bedbug, that's what we call it. The scientific name for a bedbug is the Cimex lectularius. So the reason I chose this particular one is because almost everyone in the world knows what a bedbug is, which can create bad publicity of your commercial facility like a hotel or something like that. So we find that a lot of our customers have started using the scientific names of the pests as opposed to the common names. Just so that they don't have that bad potential public relations issue with having some things like bedbugs, cockroaches, and thing like that. If you heard someone say, "I have a bedbug treatment program, " you know that they may have a problem, or you think that they may have a problem. But if they say, "We have a Cimex program," you don't think, can you think about it, "Ah, I don't know what that is but I'm glad they have one." So a lot of our customers are using these words, so it's important for us to understand that every animal has two names, it has its common name, and then it has its scientific name. Now it's not necessary as a pest-controls professional to know all of the Latin and all of the scientific names of every pest out there. But it is important for us to understand a few of them, like the bedbug, German cockroaches, and things like that. So every animal has those two names, and we don't have to know them all, but we have to know that they exist. Now let me ask the question, "What is an insect, what makes something an insect?" The legs, the body regions, and the antenna are the three things that make something an insect. Now how many legs does an insect have? It's good question. And when I asked that question in a class, you get a lot of different answers. Everything from, "Well, it depends on how old they are", or "Sometimes six, sometimes eight". Well, the right answer is every insect on this earth has six legs, no more, no less, six legs always. They have three body regions, not parts but regions, they have the head, the thorax, and the abdomen. There is always on every insect, there are three body regions on that animal. And then every insect has a pair of antenna or two antennas on their body attached to the head. So would a spider be an insect? No, a spider is not an insect, because the spider has eight legs, and only two body regions, and no antenna. So a spider is not an insect. Insects will always have six legs, three body regions, and a pair of antenna attached to the head, always. Regardless of what kind of insect it is, what specie of insect is, it will always have those three characteristics that we can depend on. Now what makes an insect kind of different? Well, one of the big things is the skeletal system of the insect. Now here you see the insect down the lower part of your screen has what we refer to as a external skeleton or exoskeleton is the scientific term for that. Compared to us the human, our skeleton is on the inside of our body, our bodies are supported from the inside out, and insect's body is supported from outside compressing in. Now, unlike a human if we break a bone, that bone can heal, that bone can be repaired by a doctor or it can be repaired just naturally in some cases. If an insect breaks its bone or skeleton, it's broken open, it cannot heal itself. So it will die, that protection, that skin, that exoskeleton that's wrapped around it actually protects the insect by keeping the moisture inside its body, which is required for its life. So the insects know that exoskeleton is extremely important to their well-being, so they will go out of their way to protect it at times. Now, if we know that, we can use that against them. We can use materials that are repellent, because they scratch or break open that exoskeleton. The insects know that, and so they will ovoid going into those areas. So we can use these repellents to make insects do what they want them to do. That's an example of what I was saying of using the insects biology and habits against itself. And that's what our approach to pest management is. It is understanding the pest and then using that knowledge to help us get control as quickly as possible. Now, if we look at the skin that exoskeleton of the insect, it's pretty complex kind of system. This is a cross-section of the actual skin of the insect, and you see there's multiple layers that the insect has to protect itself and keep that skeleton in place. So that makes getting inside the insect's body a little difficult with some of the materials that we traditionally use in pest management. We've got to break through all of these different layers of wax, cellular structures, and so forth to get into the nerves and the stomach of the insect so that we can deliver a toxin, a pesticide to it. So the insect has developed the ability to survive in one fashion by developing a thick skin if it will. So that thick-skinned insect can protect its own body from the materials that we put out, and it also protects itself from the environment in general outside. In some cases, it allows that insect to adapt and become very comfortable in many different areas that we don't normally think about insects being in. Example, a cockroach, a German cockroach can live very well inside a freezer. Given time, he can adapt and survive inside that cold environment, because of partially the skin structure, the exoskeleton structure that he has on the outside of its body. Now the insects grow through various processes. They grow through a process called metamorphosis. There's two different kinds of metamorphism. We look at a complete metamorphism and a gradual metamorphism. Now the difference there is pretty simple, a complete metamorphism has four parts. It has the egg, the larva, the pupa, and then the adult. This simple or incomplete metamorphism is a three-stage process, the egg, the nymph, and the adult. Now in the complete metamorphosis, let's talk about this separately, in the complete metamorphosis, we have the four stages, egg, larvae, pupae, and adult. The egg is protected in both actually, but in the complete metamorphosis, the egg is protected, there's nothing from a pesticide's standpoint that we can ever use, that will penetrate through that egg and kill the insect before it's born. The larva which in a complete metamorphosis looks absolutely nothing like the adult. As you see in the diagram there, this is a diagram of a flea, the larva is this warm-like structure you see after the side of the circle there. That worm looks nothing like the adult flea, it's completely different in appearance and in habits. Where the larva lives most often is not where the adult lives. So the adult will place her eggs where the larva have the highest chance of survival, which normally means around the food supply, around water in a good-sheltered area. So we have to understand what does that larva really want? Because that's where we have to start our controlled efforts. Now that larva, when it goes through its lifecycle, it will molt and grow several times. It then transforms into the pupae at which point it starts to look a little bit like the adult. Then it'll go through this pupae phase, which is kind of like the egg and that is very difficult to get anything to penetrate through that pupal case to kill the insect that's growing inside. So as it goes through its time, it will then become an adult, the adult then starts the cycle all over again. So egg turns to larva, larva turns to pupa, pupa turns to adult, adult creates more eggs, and the circle of this keeps going around. With this simple metamorphosis or incomplete metamorphosis, the egg which again is still protected turns into a nymph. Now the nymph looks like and acts like the adult, only a smaller version of the adult. It likes to live in the same area, it likes to eat the same types of food in most cases, so it's for all-in practical purposes, it's an adult in biology and in habits, but it lives in the slightly different areas sometimes because of its size, because it's so small that can live in areas that the adults cannot. So by knowing what each of these stages of the insects are going to do, it will help us design control programs so that we can break these lifecycles and prevent infestations from happening in our client's facilities. That's the purpose of understanding those, what each of those steps are going to do, and so that we can get control faster for our clients and prevent future infestations for our clients, which is the whole basis of what our pest management program does. We'll talk about that a little bit further when we get into the Integrated Pest Management section of this. Now let's look at the individual parts of the of the insect. The head is often where we start when we're doing the identification of the insect. The head contains the antenna, the mouthparts, and the eyes. It contains some other things as well, but these are the three primary things that we're looking at. We start out with the antenna and the antenna are really very sensitive sensory organs. In many times, they taste with their antenna, they can hear, smell, they detect air movement, they detect a lot of things with their antenna. And we often use that antenna as one of the starting places in our identification of the pest. There's many different forms or looks to the antenna on the screen, it's just a few of the ones that are out there, there's many others, and each of them are designed to allow the maximum sensory capabilities of that insect. We go to the mouthparts which is the next, many times, one of the next things we looked at in identifying a pest. The mouth is designed for the type of food or the preference of food for that insect. So to the side of your screen you see the housefly head here. And its mouth part is basically there's large sponge. The fly cannot eat solid food, it only eats liquid food. So this mouthpart is like a big sponge to help it absorb and pick up that liquid material. The other head, this would be the head of like a grasshopper or a locus, so it's mouth is designed to tear, grab, and chew solid material such as plant matter. So the head contains the mouthparts and the antenna. Now in the head also is the brain. The brain is connected to the nervous system which runs throughout the insect's body. So the brain, of course, is very tiny, because we're dealing with a very tiny organism, but this brain is functioning exactly like our brains, in some ways. The brain controls the body functions, it controls the body movement, it's connected to a series of nerves just like ours is, that runs throughout our body, that allows us to take data or information that our body is sending to us and formulate that data, think about it, and react to it. Insects kind of do the same thing. They can detect when there is a problem or something coming up behind them, because the nerves will send those signals to the brain that tells it, "Something's coming, run." But they don't have the ability to sit there and really kind of think. They can't sit there and reason. They can't sit there and say, "I wonder what's in that, if I go in there, will this happen." They can't do those sort of things, but they will receive signals, receive data from their nerves just like we do, and take that data and react to it. So the brain is very complex. And in many ways, it's just like ours. You know, the thorax of the insect, the second part in the middle, this is where we find the legs and the wings, if the insect has wings. Not all insects have wings, of course. Some of them have wings that do not function. They have nice large full-size wings that never do anything other than cover their body. Others have what we call vestigial wings. These are wings that were there but through the process of evolution, those wings have gotten smaller and smaller, until there's just a tiny little remnant of a wing left on its body, but it's not functioning, it doesn't fly. And, of course, other insects have no wings and never had wings. But the wings are always found on that thorax and all six of the legs originate on the thorax. So let's look at the legs for just a second. We use the legs again to help us understand what this insect is going to do. The legs are different designs based on how the insect prefers to move around. So we see like this leg here, this is a leg from something like a cricket or grasshopper. It's is designed to jump which as you know is the primary way that crickets move around. They crawl, but they're great jumpers. So the leg is designed for it to jump. This would be the leg of like a cockroach is designed to walk, to run very quick, very, streamlined. This is the leg from like a praying mantis. It's designed so it can grab and hold onto its food and hold it there. So the leg tells us where, sometimes, it tells us where the insect likes to live, but it also tells us how the insect likes to eat, how it likes to move around, how it likes to live its life. And we take all these clues and put them into our control programs so that when there's a direction of putting a material here, it's because the animal's body has said, "This is where the animal wants to be." So all of these things go into those controlled efforts, it's not just spraying a chemical out there. Now the wings are very important, when they exist. The wings are kind of like a fingerprint on the human. All the insects in the same group of insects, the wings will look exactly the same. They are the fingerprint of that particular type of insect. So on the screen, this is the wing of a drain fly, or Psychodidae fly we call it, but it's a drain fly, a small little fly that lives in the sewers underneath structures, and comes inside and creates problems. Every moth fly or drain fly in the world, wing pattern is exactly like you see on the screen. Now a housefly which has wings, of course. It's vein pattern, its fingerprint will be completely different than this, and every housefly's fingerprints will be exactly the same. Many times, particularly in food processing or in pharmaceutical facilities, we're asked to make an identification based on a wing. And that takes some time and some knowledge of the wing patterns, but that pattern of the veins in the wings will allow us to tell exactly what kind of insect it comes from. So the wings are their fingerprint. All insects in the same group or the same specie have the same wing pattern. Every insect has its own group though, and so not all of them are exactly the same, but if they're in the same group, they are identical. Now let's look at the last part of the insect which is the abdomen. The abdomen has most of the, most important working parts of the insect contained inside. This is the portion of the insect that is responsible, of course, for the continued survival of the creature and the specie. The abdomen, as we see on the screen, is broken up into 11 segments, and has a very important area on the abdomen right here. These are called the spiracles. These are small holes that allow oxygen to move into the abdomen of the insect. They don't breathe through their head, through their mouth, or nostrils like humans do, they breathe through these small holes on the abdomen. Now some insects like a cockroach has the ability to close those holes and hold its breath when it senses danger in the area. So the abdomen contains not only the breathing mechanisms, but it also contains the digestive mechanisms, and most importantly, for a species survival, it contains the reproductive mechanisms of the insect. Now here in the abdomen, we see the digestive system which is contained there. The digestive system many times is broken into three different parts. There's not just one stomach in some of these insects, there are several. The brain or, excuse me, the heart is also contained in the abdomen. It's contained partially in the thorax and the head as well, but the primary heart organ is actually in the abdomen towards the back of the insect. Now some insects, many of them can actually take that heart and stop it for period of time and survive. It can also pump the blood, the body fluid forward or backwards or from both ends into the middle based on what the insect is doing. So the abdomen is really one of the most important regions on the insect. It allows it to breathe, it allows it to protect its body by pumping blood forward or backwards, and most importantly, it allows it to reproduce so that the specie can continue. Now that's just a general look at pests. Now what you need to do is take any questions that you've had based on what we looked at, the slides that we saw, write them down, and we'll address those questions when you come in for your training here in Atlanta.