The pest control expert contracted to eradicate a bedbug infestation at Victoria Towers says the problem is not unique to the 12-storey apartment building.
“Victoria Towers has no worse a bedbug problem than any other apartment in this city, they’re just rampant through Prince George, them and cockroaches,” said Mike Jaenicke, owner/operator of Interior Pest Control.
“They’re not all over the building. They’ve got a small outbreak and we’ve scheduled a bunch of units to be treated.”
The building is located at 1245-20th Ave. Recently, several residents spoke to The Citizen about the bedbugs in their homes.
Jaenicke says there’s one Victoria Towers unit that could be ground zero for the bedbug problem that he’s been asked to treat five times. But each time he was unable to apply the chemical treatment because the place was a mess,he said, and the tenant refused to clean it.
“If the prep is not done I have no choice but to walk away," he said.
Jaenicke reported his inability to access the unit to B.C. Housing.
Management was also made aware of an outbreak on the fifth floor of the building and Jaenicke sprayed the entire floor Wednesday, July 17, requiring all the tenants and pets to leave the premises for four hours.
“Sometimes the problem we’re having is people aren’t making management aware of their pest problems,” said Jaenicke.
“We’re doing all the units on the fifth floor and I think I will end up finding one of them is highly infested and that’s who’s spreading it, and they’re not saying it.”
Embarrassment, that they are the source of the problem, is one of the most common reasons people hide bug problems from building managers, said Jaenicke. He said people are also afraid they will be evicted if they are identified as the source or they might have mental health problems that lead to a breakdown in communication.
He’s had several calls to Victoria Towers over the years and says that building is more vulnerable because it is a low-income housing property where tenants tend to acquire used beds and furniture that are more likely to have bed bugs.
Bedbugs are nocturnal parasites who feed off the blood of humans, biting people while they are asleep in bed or sitting in a chair, so they tend to collect and multiply close to beds and couches. On average on adult bedbug is about the size of an apple seed. They molt as they grow and will shed their skin up to five times during their one-year lifespan.
Unlike cockroaches, which climb and descend to different floors along plumbing and ventilation lines, Jaenicke says bedbugs do not tend to migrate vertically and are more likely to spread from unit to unit using hallways and crawling under doorways.
While some exterminators heat the room to rid bedbugs from a building, Jaenicke has had years of success using strictly chemical insecticide control and does not use heat treatment.
Jaenicke, who started his business in 1981, recently started using a product called Seclira, which has just been licensed for use in Canada, 20 years after it was approved for commercial use in the United States. It contains the active ingredient Dinotefuran.
“The beauty of it is it has virtually no odour and the stay-out time is only two hours,” Jaenicke said. “People are a lot more amenable to staying out of their units for just two hours rather than six to eight, or 24 hours. That’s why a lot of people in the industry are gravitating to it, now that it’s on the market.”
He said it takes a few hours after being sprayed for the insects to die and the insecticide also kills their eggs. He wears long sleeves and gloves but the coarse droplet sprays he uses are directed low to the ground and are not spread into the air of the room, so he says he doesn’t need to wear a mask and no venting is required.
“The insecticides have to be at a level where they’re going to kill the insects and not the client. You’re not going to use something that an insect touches it, crawls two inches and drops dead,” he said. “That’s dangerous for me to use and dangerous for the client.”
Cockroaches are also becoming a growing problem in Prince George, he said.
“Five years ago, one person had enough fingers and toes to count the times I sprayed for cockroaches in 32 years, now I’m spraying for them three to four times a week,” said Jaenicke.
