I am seeking advice on pest treatments in collection storage spaces. Presently, we engage an external contractor to undertake band spraying of internal collection spaces. Do other institutions do this or do people band spray the outside perimeter of buildings instead? If so, why? Additionally, when undertaking pest monitoring, do people place pheromones in traps or simply use sticky traps without pheromones? As the pheromones lure the pests into the traps, do they possibly paint an unrealistic picture of pests in the area? When should pheromones be used? And if they are used, in what quantity and how far apart?
Any advice on these topics would be very much appreciated. Most large institutions employ contractors to carry out pest control but they need to be carefully chosen for their ability and knowledge to reduce staff and visitor exposure to dangerous poisons. Band spraying with toxic materials in work environments is not acceptable practice due to dangers of continuous exposure of staff who may spend decades repeatedly exposed to unknown chemical risks. The proper approach is an integrated one where food preparation, consumption and waste disposal is carefully managed, sticky traps and baits used to sample the fauna environment and when threat species are identified non-residual and low toxicity remedies applied and non-threat species not affected. Synthetic pheromone technology is expensive and specific to species and even sub-species. The pheromone for cockroaches has no attraction to silverfish or anything else. Also, there are no synthetic pheromones for many threat species. Inexpensive u.v./fan traps and u.v. zappers and blunder sticky tr aps are widely effective and give a reliable overview of your environment. I introduced integrated pest management technology to the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne over 25 years ago and got a commercial pest control company to embrace the methods and materials. As the need for low toxicity methods of pest control became more widely understood other contractors saw the possibilities and Integrated Pest Management is now in wide use in Australia in art galleries and museums as well as hospitals, high tech centres, residential care units and so forth. You should have no problem in Canberra finding an IPM contractor and should find many other institutions with experience in the methodology. Thomas Dixon, former Chief Conservator, NGV (retired) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://cool.conservation-us.org/pipermail/consdistlist/attachments/20160927/97c60863/attachment.html> ****** Unsubscribe by sending a message to [email protected] Archives through August 2016 at http://cool.conservation-us.org/byform/mailing-lists/cdl/ Current archives coming soon.
