Pests in Georgia enjoy our beautiful summers here as much as we do.  Most pests thrive in the warm summer months.  However, we usually experience an explosion of ants during these months.

Fire Ants start appearing, with their tell-tale mounds, all over our yards.  Encounters are unfortunate and very painful for the unsuspecting person disturbing a fire ant colony.  Argentine ants start trailing around the foundations of our homes and, inevitably, identify a moisture or food source inside.  This leads to trails of hundreds or thousands of tiny ants into bathrooms and kitchens.  Homeowner’s attempts to get rid of the problem themselves only make the problem worse.  Extremely dry or wet conditions will also force ants to seek shelter inside our houses.

Summer is also the time for mosquitoes and ticks to appear.  A few days after rain homeowners may notice squadrons of mosquitoes attempting a hostile takeover of their yard.  The rain causes most mosquito eggs deposited in the past to activate and develop into adult females who need a blood meal in order to reproduce.  They can become a menace and totally take away the enjoyment of your yard.  Ticks can also become a problem for children or pets.  Both of these pests can inflict bites that can transmit harmful diseases. 

Fight Back!  Take your yard back from Summer Pests!  Skyline’s Prevention Programs will let you enjoy the patio, pool, grill, and entire yard again.  Contact Skyline today!

This was posted by Hitwise on April 29, 2009.

Don't worry, VerticalAgent will be up there soon. :)

I, along with many of you, receive countless e-mails from agents containing attachments.  These attachments can be in an image format such as Bitmap (.bmp), JPEG (.jpg), GIF (.gif), TIFF (.tif); or, in a document format such as Word 97-2003 (.doc), Word 2007 (.docx), Publisher (.pub), Excel 97-2003 (.xls), or Excel 2007 (.xlsx).  Your Word or Excel documents could also contain Macros which would result in the 2007 versions of Office adding an “m” to the file-extension (i.e. .docm and .xlsm, respectively).  The older versions of Office did not differentiate between Macro-enabled and standard documents with an alternate extension.

For those interested, Macros are small programs written inside Office documents that perform certain functions on the document.  They are predominantly found in large corporate documents, but can occasionally be included in smaller documents, as well.  I have written a few, in the past, for some of my clients.  However, while they are useful in controlled and trusted environments, they should never be used for public, shared documents as they are another means of transmitting viruses.

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