How to Get Rid of Fleas

Getting Rid Of Fleas: The Attack Plan

Oct 112011

how to get rid of fleas

The key to knowing how to get rid of fleas for good is in organizing a strong attack strategy. Fleas exist in multiple life stages, each one with its own strengths and vulnerabilities. Each life cycle must be targeted and the cleaning process must be thorough or fleas will reappear, seeking to take vengeance on the one who killed their friends and family. Having the right tools for the job and being persistent are essential to clearing an infestation from a home.

Attack Plan 1: Hit the Pets First

Animals are where fleas get most of their food, so this is where they likely to hang out. While a pet may be a cute companion to its owner, to an army of fleas it is a walking buffet. The most important things to concentrate on when clearing a pet of infestation are the following:

Treat the pet with a flea-killing chemical or natural product.
Wash and treat any bedding or other items the pet may sleep on.
Try to keep pets sleeping in one area to minimize the areas of heavy flea population (good luck with this one).
Make sure pets stay away from areas that have been or are currently being treated until they are all clear.
Bathe pets regularly and make sure they have a healthy diet to prevent fleas from moving back in.

Attack Plan 2: Vacuum Everything

A vacuum can be a fleas worst enemy.

Research has shown that vacuuming regularly is actually one of the best ways to keep fleas from infesting an area. Sucking up the little bugs into a vacuum and dumping the bag into the garbage will remove many of the fleas from the house is a simple way (for those that hate vacuuming, maybe not so simple). Make sure to get the bag out of the house as fast as possible so that fleas do not just crawl back out and return home after their vacuum vacation. Vacuuming works great for fleas that are not affected by normal flea treatments.

Vacuuming should be especially concentrated in areas that pets hang out and around the legs of furniture where pets like to rub up against. If pets are spoiled and allowed on the furniture, then the furniture will have to be vacuumed too.

Attack Plan 3: Treat the House

Once pets are clean and the vacuuming has been done, it is time to bring out the weapons of war. Foggers, flea bombs, aerosol sprays, powders or other treatments should be applied to carpets, furniture, pet bedding and any other places where fleas may have built up. Linens and other items where pets may sleep (including that newly-washed pile of laundry they decided to lay in) should all be washed to get rid of fleas and their eggs.

Attack Plan 4: Yard Treatment

Outdoor pets that sleep in the yard may leave piles of eggs in their wake. Generally, yard treatment is the least of a pet owner’s problems, but making sure to kill fleas outside will prevent them from getting back inside where they are not wanted. Since yards are exceedingly difficult to vacuum, a special spray will be required to perform this treatment.

Areas of particular importance are places where animals sleep or hang out a lot. Doghouses, kennels, under the deck and anyplace that a pet has claimed as its own personal space should be the focus of treatment.

Once the entire attack plan has been executed, one should wait a week or so and do it again just to make sure. If fleas show up before then, immediately launching another attack may be necessary. Ultimately, the key to getting rid of fleas lies in vigilance and persistence. By keeping up treatments and making sure that everything remains clean, fleas will have less chance to gain a foothold and become a major problem.

Black Lab photo courtesy of Michal Marcol / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Frequently Asked Questions about Fleas

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Oct 112011

They come when you least expect it and travel in numbers. They bite and cause great annoyance, day and night. They latch onto their prey and suck the blood out of it for sustenance. They are one of the most annoying pests in the world and they can be found on every continent, including Antarctica.

While many people may think this accurately describes the typical teenager, what it really refers to is something even more insidious – fleas.

Fleas are a problem that pet lovers and those who stay in cheap motels must inevitably face one day. The trick to beating this seemingly endless horde of insects is knowing all about them. As a famous general somewhere probably once said at some time “Know Your Enemy!”

What Kind of Weather Do Fleas Enjoy?

Fleas like warm, humid weather.

Fleas come out when the weather is warm and thrive particularly well when the humidity is high. The optimal environment for fleas is a temperature between 70 and 85 degrees Fahrenheit and a humidity of around 85 percent. While they can survive in pretty much any temperature, this combination of heat and moisture makes them more active and can quickly turn a few fleas into an entire infestation. This is why most people find that their flea problems start in the spring and taper off during the fall.

When the cold does come, fleas enter into a sort of hibernation state where they can exist without food for more than 100 days. Ironically, their life span increases the more adverse their environment is. While a warm, comfortable flea may live but a few short weeks, a cold, starving flea may sit about for a year or more waiting for the best time to become active. If only human beings had it so good.

Will Fleas Eat Anything?

There are more than 2000 species of flea and each one has its own preferred host. The most common species of flea in North America is the cat flea. This is the flea that most people have problems with when their pets become infested. When the number of fleas starts to get so high that the cat becomes crowded, the fleas do not erect high-rise condominiums but instead move on to other food sources – namely, humans.

How Do I Know That’s a Flea?

Common Cat Flea. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

The typical flea is approximately 1/16th to 1/8th of an inch long and usually dark in color. To the naked eye they look like little black dots and can often be mistaken for a piece of lint or dirt until they begin to crawl about or take a bite. They are wingless, but can jump like nobody’s business. In fact, of all animals in the world the flea ranks 2nd place in its ability to jump, being able to clear a distance of about 7 inches vertical and 13 horizontal. This is around 200 times their average body length.

While fleas can be seen, their eggs usually cannot. What makes it worse is that the numbers of fleas that one might see in the house are just the adults. Adult fleas only account for a tiny 5 percent of all fleas in house, the rest being in other stages of the development. You can go here to read more about the life cycle of a flea.

Where Are the Fleas Coming From?

They're cute, but they bring fleas into the house!

These little nuisances (fleas) come in on larger, furrier, more lovable nuisances known as pets. Once the fleas are indoors where the weather is almost always warm, they set up shop and make a home for themselves everywhere your pet rests its head. As they feed on the poor beast and breed, they leave eggs all over the place where they can develop and turn into new hungry little insects.

Indoors, this life cycle will continue year-round. Outdoors, the cold and lack of food supply will kill many fleas and send the rest of them into their hibernation until things begin to look better. Getting rid of fleas requires a supreme effort on the part of a home-owner to scour every last place where they may be and kill every one of them as they hatch – a process that can often take weeks. Knowing how to get rid of fleas the right way can save weeks and possibly months of time and effort.

Different Ways to Get Rid of Fleas

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Oct 112011

Being Armed In the Battle against Fleas

Part of knowing how to get rid of fleas is understanding the different ways that it can be done and which methods are the best to use in any given circumstance. Chemical products are the most widely-used option, though many people have been switching to natural products as a safer alternative.

Chemical Flea Control

By far the most commercially popular method of killing fleas is the use of shampoos, dips, dusts, powders, sprays and oils that utilize insecticides that either poison the flea or disrupt its growth or breeding capabilities. Each type of product has its own advantages and disadvantages.

chemical flea treatments Shampoos, dips, oils and sprays will kill the fleas that are on a pet, but the pet may become re-infested quickly once they travel into an area where flea eggs have dropped and hatched. Some products may offer extended protection, but if the rest of the problem is not taken care of, this is a temporary fix at best.

Topical products allow a pet owner to just place a drop of the flea-fighting chemical on the pet (usually on the back of its neck) and it continues to get rid of fleas for a month. Many topical solutions contain insect growth regulators (IGRs) which work by preventing future fleas from developing into adults.

Oral medications can be an easier alternative than trying to bathe an unwilling pet, putting the pesticide directly into their food. It then enters into the animal’s bloodstream and any eggs from fleas that feed off the pet will fail to hatch.

Foggers and bug bombs are good for clearing out an area of a nasty infestation, but rarely work on all four stages of the flea’s life cycle. Therefore, they must be used in conjunction with other treatments or done several times to kill each new generation. They are also very toxic and require that living things be removed from the house during their use and for a time afterwards, which can be inconvenient.

Aerosol sprays work much the same way as foggers, but allow a greater level of precision when hunting down fleas. It is much easier to treat hard-to-reach spaces such as under or behind furniture with sprays. Plus they offer the satisfaction of personally hunting and killing the fleas one’s self.

Being Cautious with Chemicals

Many of these chemical products are designed to work on either a cat or a dog, but not both. It is important to know which animals can be treated with which products or pets might end up getting sick. For the pet owner that has both dogs and cats, there are products that are good for both or one can buy separate products for each animal. The same goes for kittens and puppies. Smaller animals will be more sensitive to chemicals and need lower doses or special products.

You should always stick to using one chemical product at a time. Mixing treatments can lead to some very sick animals; either the chemicals will interact in bad ways or the two separate treatments will have the same insecticides in them and cause the pet to overdose. Pets will rarely be grateful for a trip to the hospital, whether their fleas are gone or not.

Natural and Organic Flea Control

Lots of people are understandably concerned about putting poisons onto their pet or into its bloodstream. There are also concerns about children who handle the pets because they may end up with pesticides on their hands. A variety of natural, safe options have garlic cloves arisen in response to this demand.

Diatomaceous earth – A powder that is sprinkled on pets. Dehydrates the fleas and kills them. Can be harmful if inhaled, so wearing a mask is recommended when using (for both humans and pets).
Garlic and brewer’s yeast – When placed into a pet’s food, these will cause the animal’s blood to become stinky and unattractive to fleas. They can be bought in pill forms at stores or from a veterinarian.
Herbal repellants – Cloves, eucalyptus oil, wormwood tea and citrus oil. These are usually brushed into the fur and allowed to soak into the skin of a pet.
Cedar Oil – Non-toxic and safe for pets, cedar oil has proven to be an effective flea-killing method.

Talking to a veterinarian about the effectiveness and safety of any flea-killing product is the best way to make sure that your pet stays healthy and does not resent you for years to come.

Photo of bottles courtesy of Kittikun Atsawintarangkul / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The Life Cycle of a Flea

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Oct 112011

Like all living things, fleas have their own cycle of life. From egg to adult, the flea grows, changes its diet to subsist on different things and eventually becomes a reproductive member of flea society, having little flea children of its own. Understanding the way they live out their lives can be useful in understanding how to get rid of fleas.

flea life cycle

Stage 1: The Egg

A female flea lays eggs in batches of approximately 20 and will lay an average of 500 during her lifetime. These eggs are generally deposited onto the skin or in the hair of the host animal. The eggs are not secure, however (so much for flea-baby car seat laws), and so they tend to roll off and end up everywhere that the host travels.

Flea eggs are almost impossible to see with the naked eye, measuring only 1/50th of an inch. Newly laid eggs will take anywhere form 2 days to 2 weeks to hatch, depending on the environmental conditions.

Stage 2: The Larva

Once the fleas hatch from their eggs, they slither about, using their bristles for motion and avoiding the sunlight. Their main activity during this stage is eating. A larva’s diet consists of any organic matter that they can find. Much to the larva’s dismay, the most common food to be found is usually flea feces, though occasionally they may enjoy a gourmet meal of pet feces or rotting vegetable matter.

As the larvae (plural of larva) eat, they will go through three molting stages, shedding their skin and growing larger. It usually takes one to two weeks for a larva to finish its molts and move on to the next stage, although in less-than-ideal conditions this process can take up to 6 months. Eventually, the larvae will weave themselves a cocoon and enter the pupa stage of their lives.

Stage 3: The Pupa

In the pupa stage, the developing flea will spend from 5 to 7 days in its cocoon doing basically nothing. Once it emerges from the cocoon, however, it is a fully functioning adult, ready to start biting and breeding and making life difficult for people and pets alike.

The pupa stage is also one of the most resilient of a flea’s life cycle. If the environment is not right for a flea to emerge and be successfully productive, it can stay in this state for up to an entire year, awaiting optimal conditions.

Stage 4: The Adult

Once the flea has come out of its cocoon, it begins hopping about and looking for a warm meal. Fleas will often remain nesting for long periods of time if food is not available, only becoming active when they sense their meal has been delivered. The main things on a flea’s mind at this point are food and sex (kind of like a typical teenage male). Female adults must feed on blood before they are capable of reproducing. Once they have fed and bred, the cycle begins all over again as another batch of eggs create the next generation of fleas.

Environment and the Life Cycle of a Flea

The life cycle of a flea is very heavily influenced by the environmental conditions that it happens to be developing in. Warm, humid conditions will promote faster growth while cold, dry conditions will slow the growth cycle and prevent many eggs from hatching at all. Most indoor environments, such as someone’s home, are the right temperature for fleas to enjoy a productive life. The tendency for fleas to enter a hibernation state when cold means that one lonely flea can be hidden away during the winter months and, come summer, he will hatch and begin to infest an area rapidly.

Flea Populations

At any given time, the population of a flea infestation sits at about:

5% – Adult
10% – Pupae
35% – Larvae
50% – Eggs

This pattern means that flea populations are unevenly distributed, and thus they are a much bigger problem than pests with a predictable breeding cycle. Getting rid of fleas in any given stage of life requires looking in different places, using different methods and, above all, being persistent.

Photos of fleas courtesy of Ken Gray Image Collection, Oregon State University

Flea Bites: Being Eaten Alive

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Oct 112011

Night or day, fleas have no preference for the times they choose to make a meal of people or pets. When an infestation is bad enough, biting fleas can keep people up at all hours of the night and make it nearly impossible to get a decent night’s sleep. Until you know how to get rid of fleas permanently, there are a few things that you should know about their bites, how best to deal with them and some of the problems that they can cause.

Recognizing the Infestation

Flea bites often look like the bites of other insects, and while no one really wants to be bitten by a tiny parasite of any sort, it is best to know who the enemy is. Flea bites appear as a formation of slightly raised, swollen areas that have a tiny puncture point in the middle of each. They can appear as single bites, but fleas tend to go back for seconds and thirds, so usually they show up in groups of two or three in either a line or cluster pattern.

These are sand flea bites.

The annoying itching that accompanies flea bites is actually caused by the saliva that the flea secretes when biting into the flesh. This itching can remain for several weeks. Bites usually appear on the ankle and feet due to the flea’s limited, low-altitude hunting ground, but if a bed gets infested they can appear all over the body. Fleas are very gender-liberal, and both male and female fleas bite with equal abandon.

Flea Bite Complications

These cones prevent pets from making matters worse.

Some people and animals have allergic reactions to flea saliva which can turn a simple bite into a serious rash. In humans this can be a general annoyance. In pets this can lead to patches of hair loss as the animal scratches itself raw. Bites can also bleed if scratched too much or too roughly and may end up becoming infected. For young animals or in particularly bad infestations, flea bites may actually lead to anemia.

Fleas are also known for carrying a variety of diseases. The most famous of these is the bubonic plague, which, thanks to a few rat fleas, managed to wipe out a third of the population of Europe in just a few short years. Luckily, in today’s day and age, there is a treatment for the bubonic plague, though that does not mean that fleas are not still carrying it about. Some other diseases that fleas may carry are typhus and tularemia. Contrary to what some people may claim, HIV is not transferable by fleas – according to the scientific experts on the matter.

Crazily enough fleas may become infected with tapeworms. These tapeworms can be transferred to pets if the pet ends up eating one of these infected fleas. Tapeworms can be a much bigger problem than fleas so making sure you treat fleas early on is important.

Treating Flea Bites

Scratching away at flea bites only irritates them and increases the possibility of them becoming infected. The best course of action is to keep the bitten area clean and use an ointment, cream, lotion or other method to reduce the itching sensations until the bites heal.

Some common treatments for flea bites consist of:

Antihistamines
Hydrocortisone cream
Calamine lotion
Lukewarm baths with an oatmeal solution
Cold compresses

When bathing, cold water is recommended over hot due to hot water’s tendency to make the itching even worse.

For animals, various medications to stop itching can be bought over-the-counter or acquired at a veterinarian’s office. These come in a choice of shampoos, oils, salves, lotions and sprays for ease of application. Often, these products will also contain an anti-bacterial agent in them to help prevent infections from occurring. I also recommend that you train your pet to get a job and make some money to help pay for all of these products, as they were the cause of all the trouble in the first place.

Picture Sources:

Dog with cone courtesy of ldpedersen at Flickr.

Flea bites on human skin courtesy of robz431 at Flickr

Getting Rid Of Fleas: The Attack Plan

Frequently Asked Questions about Fleas

Different Ways to Get Rid of Fleas

The Life Cycle of a Flea

Flea Bites: Being Eaten Alive

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