RALEIGH -- In the take-no-prisoners world of pest control, where the eternal fight between man and vermin plays out in crevices and crawl spaces and every victory is fleeting at best, bedbugs are just the latest Public Enemy No. 1.
They are today's Al Capone of the insect-management industry, the subject of public and private study and daylong symposiums, or short courses such as the one Wednesday at the 2011 Pest Control Technician's School at the North Raleigh Hilton.
"Their world looks different than our world," Jay Breusch told several hundred members of the N.C. Pest Management Association gathered for his pre-lunch discussion of bedbugs in commercial settings.
After 28 years in the business, Breusch seems to relish getting inside the tiny heads of the various critters he stalks across 10 states for a company based in Fridley, Minn. When he's not on the road with his PowerPoint presentation helping pest-control workers get their annual certifications, he's exploring the dark, funky spaces of buildings where maintenance crews fear to tread.
"I'm having a ball," said the former seventh-grade German teacher. "I get to solve mysteries every day. I get to be a counselor, a carpenter, a detective, a cop. No two days are ever the same.
"And, I get to kill stuff."
About 750 people are attending the three-day school, one of the largest such gatherings in the country, according to Kristin Dodd, association president, who spent one summer of her youth checking rat traps in the city of Monroe's sewer system for her family's pest-control business.
Severe infestation?
Passers-by on Wake Forest Road did occasional double takes at the scores of exterminator trucks in the hotel parking lot, wondering, perhaps, if management had discovered a major infestation.
In fact, for the duration of the school, the hotel might be the most inhospitable place in the state for an insect. One grand ballroom and a lobby have been temporarily converted into a pest-elimination marketplace, with vendors offering the latest in pheromone lures, chemical applicators, mattress encasements and rodent "jails." As it turns out, America has built a better mousetrap.
Clients' demands shift
The industry has evolved in many ways. When Breusch got into it, he said, customers weren't satisfied that their pest problems had been solved unless they could smell chemicals. Now, he said, they equate that odor with elevated cancer risks and other things they fear even more than blood-sucking insects.
So the business uses safer chemicals and fewer of them, relying also on traps and even heat treatments to keep pests at bay.
Although he won't say the industry is recession-proof, Breusch says the company he works for has grown larger every year since it was founded in 1915, including the years of the Great Depression.
It helps that there is always some insect scourge to fight, whether in the field or behind the furniture. Boll weevils. Bed bugs. Africanized bees. Imported fire ants. Carpenter bees. Bed bugs, redux.
"You kill 'em, they come back. You kill 'em, they come back. That's job security," said William Tomlinson, who fumigates tobacco and other goods for a Wilmington shipping company to meet the import requirements of other countries.
"It is sort of a war," Tomlinson said. "It's the war that you really don't want to win. Just like the military. If there were no wars, what would all those service people do?"
