I recently wined about glue boards. If you don’t know about my wineing, you are in for a treat! I thought I would expand on that a bit and provide some more information.
Let me start by saying that glue boards are a useful tool in pest management. Like any tool, it has its benefits, drawbacks, and it can’t be the only tool used. I am not against using glue boards. I will say that I think they are overused.
Glue boards are great because they can be used against almost every pest we have (excluding bed bugs). Because they indiscriminately catch anything that blunders onto them, that can be a bad thing. Non-target animals, paws, fingers, forklifts, and many other things can get stuck on them. Put a glue board in the middle of the floor and it’s a good bet there will be tons of things that get stuck to it. Not to mention it will probably get relocated on the bottom of someone’s shoe.
Placement becomes really important to target those pests you want to capture and to avoid everything else. If you are trying to catch flying insects, putting a glue board on the ground is pretty worthless.
It’s often about the Goldilocks zone. Many times, where the pests are likely to be isn’t a great place to put a glue board. So you need to get it close, but make sure it’s still going to be useful. A great example of this is when your target pest is German cockroaches. You know they are likely behind the dishwasher, but putting it behind the dishwasher is inconvenient for checking and replacing it. Putting it underneath means it gets sopping wet every time the floor is washed. It may need to go to the side, or under a cabinet nearby as the next best option.
They aren’t checked enough. Here, I’m mostly talking about residential accounts. Put out a glueboard by a door, looking for accidental invaders like spiders and come back next visit. Except, the next time you are there it’s likely two or even three months later. What is that going to tell you? It’s going to tell you that at some point over the last three months, a spider or spiders got in. Did they trickle in over that time period? Did they all get stuck in the first week? Is is completely covered in spiders so much that no other spiders could get stuck to it? (and therefore spiders got further into the house.) Sure, it’s going to catch things that come in, but it hasn’t given you much information.
Speaking of information, glue boards aren’t always used as the monitoring device they are. Yes, glue boards are a trap. What gets trapped, how many get trapped, and where they are trapped is valuable information to hone in on an issue. Picture this: you have a warehouse that is struggling with cigarette beetles. There are 50 glue boards scattered through the site and they are catching cigarette beetles. Other than the fact that there are CB, that’s all the info there is. If you know that only the glue boards on the west wall are catching beetles and the counts have been going down over the last few weeks means you can target treatment just on the west, and the issue is getting better. Not “reading” the data means wasted time and energy.
Public perception is important. People don’t like pests, that’s why they call us. People also don’t like to see an animal struggling as it’s stuck to a board. Some people are actively against the use of glue boards because of the non-targets that can get caught. For that reason, glue boards should be hidden from people’s view as much as possible. Put them in a station, hide them under a shelf, put them above a cupboard. This brings us back to the Goldilocks zone of getting them somewhere they can be effective, but not visible.
I was going to say that this applies to glue boards that aren’t in light traps, but really, all of the above points do apply to ILTs as well.
Like any tool, glue boards can be used effectively, or they can be used poorly. They are a great early warning system to let you know when pests start occurring at an account so corrective actions can take place quickly before it gets to infestation levels. Once again, I’m not against using glue boards. I do want them used judiciously and effectively. If you want help with that, we do that, contact us.
Lagniappe - you know you want to see a giant glue board being tested.
Urban Pest Consulting
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