OT-ish - bugs

Doh, sorry, forgotto include links:

and

In you photo mainly woodlice. Harmless. The live on rotting vegetation and rotting wood. You may have some rotting floors under that carpet:(

More likely with an empty properties is a build of blown in dead vegetation, leaves etc. around the perimeter of the property and then that remaining damp forming the idea habitat for woodlice.

Thanks for that Alan. The photos were taken in the conservatory which has a concrete floor, so from what you say it looks like a build-up of dead leaves etc., on the outside.

Although harmless, wife and son are terrified of anything that creeps, crawls or slithers around and whilst I'm not terrified of them, they're really not nice and I, too, would like them gone. Once I've cleared all the dead leaves etc., is there anything I can put down outside to stop them from coming in?

Once you cleared any damp vegetation they will not come in. You will also find them under flower pots you may have on a patio etc. You probably will not see them until you lift the pot.

That lets you out of food composting then. We have two containers, one of which has rotted down nicely and we're in the process of filling the second now. Every time I lift the lid, there's hundreds of worms on the underside of the lid, so I shake 'em back in.

To bring it back to slaters (woodlice) our compost bin is full of them whenever you lift the lid the top of the pile seems to be moving this impression is given by HUNDREDS of slaters.

They are pretty harmless, but if you find them distasteful ensure they have nothing to live on and they will migrate to your actual garden.

So no pile of leaves and no rotten sills, doorframes etc.

That's the Scotttish term that I learned as a child.

Thanks everyone, will get them sorted.

Andy Smith formulated on Tuesday :

Forgot to ask - what are those long curled up tube-like things? All this wildlife is giving us all nightmares and I don't know if I'm really seeing them everywhere out of the corner of my eyes of if I'm just halucinating bugs! :'( 8-o :')

Dead millipede They feed on the same things as woodlice

New name to me. They're "sows" in Derbyshire and "chucky pigs" down here. I've no idea of the etymology of either without looking them up.

Spray pyrerthrum everywhere I've been invaded by fruit flies and ladybirds (should one call them cisbeetles?)

Grammarsows in Cornwall. As already mentioned, they're slaters in Scotland, which is what my father, a Glaswegian, called them. Quite harmless. They have very soft mouths so can only eat decaying stuff. A good hoovering around will get rid of them, and make sure there's no damp in corners or under carpets. They love damp places.

They're cheeselogs where I come from - a type of crustacean in fact. The picture also shows a small fly and a small centipede (the reversed figure 9) of some sort.

Well cannot see the pictures of course, but if you see any beetle like bugs with orange backs with spots, those are carpet beetles. Woodlice normally means damp walls and rotting wood. I hope the surveyor looked for this as its rather fundamental!

Brian

Also, if you have a wall with peeling paint then they tend to live there as well under the flaky bits. We had an old wall next to the kitchen like this, Having it sanded down and rendered seems to have stopped them as they were coming up the kitchen waste pipe into the sink before. Not sure what they live on. Brian

Ladybirds will be looking for somewhere to spend the winter. Come spring and they'll go out to eat all your greenfly.

Andy

In message snipped-for-privacy@mid.individual.net>, Tim Streater snipped-for-privacy@streater.me.uk> writes

My compost bins are well-populated with compost worms, slugs, snails and wood-lice. Between bouts of copulation, all enthusiastically work away eating, digesting and excreting whatever gets put in the bins. If I come across any slugs and snails in the garden, I carefully transfer them to the compost bins. They've never had it so good!