Your Second Home | Pest Prevention: Those Uninvited Guests

YOU may have heard the story about the woman who waited until July to open her country home and found the living room shrouded in spider webs.

Or of the house guests who were shown to a bedroom in a friend’s summer cottage where the bed had been made and unused for a couple of years. It was writhing with silverfish.

Or the toddler who hid Christmas candies under a sofa cushion just before his parents closed their weekend house for the winter. They returned in the spring to find so many ants that they had to throw out the sofa.

These calamities, akin to urban legends of alligators in sewers, couldn’t happen to you, of course: You keep your weekend home tidy, you make sure bed linens are fresh, and your children eat their candy right away. But bugs like vacation homes as much as the owners and their guests do.

That vacation homes are often vacant and untended means that bugs — especially spiders, ants and silverfish — have a free run of the house much of the time.

On the Jersey Shore, Chris Mauceri, who owns ACM Pest Management in Ocean City, says he gets a flurry of calls every spring as people return to open their houses. “Spiders that have been dormant over the winter, hiding in crawl spaces and walls, try to get inside houses in the spring,” he said.

It’s difficult to eliminate all spiders from a home, especially out in the country. And your middle-school science pupil might tell you to try to tolerate spiders because they are beneficial. But it is hard to make that case for the VW-size one prowling your kitchen.

A persistent spider problem probably means you have a large population of whatever bug it is that the spiders are eating, so look at webs to see what insects have been caught. Get rid of clutter that creates hiding places, and use a vacuum cleaner to suck up webs and destroy spiders and egg sacs. Try not to think about “Charlotte’s Web.”

Silverfish reproduce slowly and are easier to control. You may not be able to eliminate all the stuff they like to eat — including cotton, linen, rayon, silk, paper and glue (your library!) — but you can regularly wash bed linens and keep watch on other fabrics.

Residual pesticides (especially aerosols that are labeled for silverfish) are useful to halt an infestation. Since the silverfish probably entered the house through the basement, clean it thoroughly, tossing out cardboard boxes and addressing any dampness problems.

There are many products that deal effectively with ants indoors, but not all problems are in the house. After not having used his weekend home for “quite a while,” Frank Starr, a Baltimore journalist, arrived at his home on Tilghman Island on the Eastern Shore of Maryland to find black specks flowing out with the water from the bathroom shower and other taps.

Ants, in search of water, had used an electrical line as a freeway to go deep into the well. Once there, they drowned, but that didn’t keep other ants from making the same suicidal trip. The treatment involved pouring bleach down the well and running all the taps nonstop for almost two days. “That didn’t do it,” Mr. Starr said.

The next step was to “blow the well,” forcing compressed air into it to blow the ant carcasses out. Then more bleach. Then running the water for two or three days. It worked, saving Mr. Starr the cost of a new well. Then the well was sealed to keep ants out.

Regular maintenance during the off-season reduces the risk of squirmy surprises when you’re ready to use the house. “Out here,” said Doug Johnston, who owns Bandit Trapping and Pest Control in Southampton, N.Y., “a lot of the houses have caretakers who keep insect problems from arising.”