Hi, I found your website this week and its been a life saver. So our cat had fleas and probably had them for a good while before we noticed. Our house got infested. I was 9 months pregnant at the time and started to get bitten on the 4th Dec 2011. Only realized we had a flea problem on the 31st dec 2012. I got cat treated with Frontline and vet gave me spray for the house. One week later I’m still getting bitten and went into hospital to have baby so had to put the cat in the kennels. Long story short, i got rid of mattresses in spare rooms (where cat spent most of her time asleep) and got exterminator out on the 27th Jan 2012 when i got home from hospital. The cat is now living in my mams house ( I know from reading your articles it would have been better to have her still in the house but she is gone now). I had been hoovering every day and as its a Dyson hoover i cannot remove any bags so have put flea collar in the cylinder of the hoover and empty it into black bag and throw away. I was still getting bitten (I’m the only one in house getting bites). Exterminator had to come 4 times, the last being yesterday. I found dead flea on my mattress and a dead flea under the sofa. Its so long going on I don’t know how much more I can take. Exterminator told me not to hoover again now for 5 days to let the spray settle but that contradicts what you are saying to keep hoovering. What would you advise? Thanks so much, I love your flea traps – can i order them here in Ireland??
First, not vacuuming will no doubt keep the fleas in their pupae stage longer. That means if you stop vacuuming, the flea problem will continue to persist.
Second, why is your service company asking you to not vacuum anymore? Probably because if the fleas aren’t hatching, it’s less likely you’ll call him to come back and retreat.
Third, how long will the problem persist? Well, as our article explains, as long as it takes for the flea pupae to run out. So if you have 500 flea pupae and they’re hatching at a rate of 5 a day, it would take 100 days. Keep in mind there is no practical way to tell how many pupae you might have so realistically, there is no way to know for sure.
Forth, as our article explains, flea pupae prefer pets over people. And in fact, they’ll hatch 50-75% faster when pets are readily available. So by removing your pet you’ve effectively made you and the family the sole target for the developing pupae. That means you’ll bear the brunt of every flea that hatches since there is no pet available. More importantly, the pupae really don’t want people so they’ll wait extra long to hatch compared to when a pet is around. This just adds to the length of time the problem will persist.
Fifth, our FLEA TRAPS are only sold here in the states. But we do sell them abroad and for anyone located outside the US, you can order them through our International Shopping Cart:
Flea Trap: http://inter.bugspraycart.com/traps/electric/flea-trap
(US residents order here: http://www.bugspraycart.com/traps/electric/flea-trap)
In summary, you are no doubt making this problem worse than it needs to be. In my estimation, it would not surprise me if the problem is active for another month or two. Keeping several pets around would effectively stop the problem for people immediately. And though spraying over and over will help, this will pose more and more of an unneeded health hazard to the people and pets inside the home. No doubt Flea Traps will help but they’re not as good as a pet. Still, they might be your only savior save the spray. And the vacuuming most go on because if you stop that, I’m afraid the problem will be able to sustain itself even longer than it should.
Sorry for the bad news but I don’t think I’m telling you anything you didn’t already know from our article.
Flea Article: www.flea.net/flea-control
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