Image credit: Robbie Shade via Flickr under Creative Commons License 2.0

It seems that warmer weather is finally here to stay. The days keep getting longer as the first official day of summer is right around the corner. Summer can often be a busy time for pest control folks as the warm weather brings more bugs. We were interested in taking a look at some of our internal data to figure out what pests are the most common in homes in different towns. At Insight Pest Solutions, we’re proud to be able to service cities throughout the United States. But for this project, we decided to narrow the focus and look at Greater Boston pest control service calls.

When we sat down to look at our data, we focused on four insects: Ants, spiders, roaches, silverfish, and carpenter ants. We gathered logs of all of our recent service callbacks and found the total number of calls for each pest in each town in the Greater Boston area. As a note, we consider ‘callbacks’ to be any time a customer needs help with a pest outside of normal, routine appointments. After looking at the data, we ended up finding, somewhat as we expected, that there are a lot of ant problems.

We found that ants are the leading pest in 75 percent of towns. Specifically, Shrewsbury had the most callbacks with over 45. Marlborough, Framingham, Holliston, and Franklin rounded out the top 5. It’s not surprising that so many places had so many callbacks for ants — scientists estimate there are at least 10 billion billion ants living throughout the world, although we may never know the exact number. It’s logical, then, that so many households have ant problems.

The second most common pest in towns are spiders, leading in 15% of the area. Franklin had the most callbacks for spiders, although they were outpaced by ants. South Grafton was the town with the second most calls.

Outside of ants and spiders, there were a few towns that lead with silverfish and carpenter ants. No town had roaches as their most common pest. That’s not to say there weren’t service calls, just not as many as the other insects.

Overall, it was interesting to see how we could use our internal data to take a look at a region as a whole. In this case, it made more sense to keep the data to just one area — the Greater Boston region. Ants were by far the leading pest, with spiders coming in second. As summer continues, we expect to stay busy as the bugs (try) to march in!

Featured image credit to Robbie Shade via Flickr under CC License 2.0.

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