Mice can carry several serious diseases and are a leading trigger of allergies and asthma in the home. So if you have them where you live, you’ll want to get rid of them! Here’s advice on how to catch them if they get in and how to keep mice away…from pest-management specialist Susannah Krysko.
Mice nest where there’s a reliable source of warmth and food. Strategies: Keep unsealed food off your countertops…don’t leave crumbs around…and clean up any spills, especially ones down the side of your stove. Also don’t leave pet food out at night. Outside the house, keep vegetation off the building, and don’t feed birds during a mouse infestation.
Before cooler temperatures drive mice indoors, inspect your home’s exterior for any holes the size of a pencil eraser or larger. Pack those holes with wire mesh, and seal them with caulking. Do the same thing inside the home, blocking spaces around pipes and wires where mice could travel from level to level or room to room.
To prevent mice from getting into your walls, make the walls inaccessible. If mice are already in the walls, you will have to trap them when they come out for food (see below). Make sure all your sinks have collars fixed around the pipes where they exit the drywall.
Make sure exterior doors, including the front and garage doors, have proper sweeps or flaps so there’s no gap underneath where mice could enter.
Don’t bother with poison, mice repellents, mint or glue traps, all of which either don’t work or have serious drawbacks. And don’t count on your cat for mouse control.
The best mouse traps are the old-fashioned spring variety. They work great, kill instantly and are cheap enough—around $1 each—that you can just toss the trap and the mouse out after a kill rather than trying to extricate the dead rodent.
For every mouse you see, there probably are six others in the house, so set at least six traps per mouse sighting. Place traps along the trails of droppings the rodents leave as they make their nightly rounds.
The best bait for mouse traps is whatever they’ve been eating—pet food cereal, peanut butter or even chocolate. If that food is difficult to stick to the mousetrap trigger, dab on a little Crisco first and stick the food to that.
One way to end a mouse invasion: Bait your traps with a little thread or yarn and some cotton balls dabbed in vanilla. Female mice have a strong instinct to make a soft nest for their young. Enticed by the scent of vanilla, the mother mouse will try to carry the stuff off to use as nesting material and trigger the trap.
Mice can be wily, but you can outsmart them by leaving traps out for a few days without setting them. When you see that the mice have started taking the bait, set the traps with the same bait. If a mouse springs a trap and escapes: It may avoid traps for a while. Move the trap to a different location, and begin the process again, putting food on the trap without setting it until the mouse is once again comfortable stepping onto it.
Another popular trapping option: Bucket traps, where you set up a plank with some bait at the end. The mice are lured up to the top of the plank onto the bucket lid where they fall through the “trap door” into a bucket of water and drown.
Lethal baits. Professionals have access to better products than we can buy without a license. And the products we can buy on our own can be dangerous to animals and children.
If you can’t solve a mouse problem with exclusion efforts and traps, it is time to call a professional to help solve the problem.
