ProShield Pest SolutionsProShield Pest SolutionsA Longmont pest control company will not treat most wildlife, protected birds and bats, honeybee swarms, tree pests like ash borer, garden and lawn problems, or fleas and lice living on people and pets — those jobs belong to wildlife control operators, beekeepers, arborists, vets, and doctors. We handle the structural invaders: mice, rats, ants, spiders, wasps, boxelder bugs, cluster flies, and the cracks they come in through. Knowing the difference saves you a wasted appointment and a wasted afternoon. Here's the honest list, learned the hard way in crawlspaces from Old Town to Clover Basin.
I once spent forty minutes flat on my back under a Southmoor Park ranch house hunting a "huge rat" that turned out to be a very relaxed fox squirrel that had chewed through a crawlspace vent screen. Forty minutes. Insulation in my collar for two days. The homeowner was lovely about it, and I got a lesson I still use: half of what people call a pest problem isn't the kind of problem a pest control company should be touching. That's not me dodging work. It's that the fix for a squirrel is a trap, a repair, and a hardware cloth patch — not a product. You want the person whose actual job that is. So this article is a list of what we say no to, and who we send you to instead. If you'd rather skip to the point: if it lives in your walls and has fur bigger than a mouse, if it flies and is protected, if it's in your tree or your tomatoes, or if it's on your dog — that's someone else's call.
Raccoons, skunks, squirrels, and prairie dogs are wildlife jobs in Colorado, handled by wildlife control operators under state rules, and no spray or bait touches them. There's no chemical answer to a raccoon in a chimney. There's a chimney cap. Along the Left Hand Creek and St. Vrain Greenway corridors we see plenty of both — cottonwoods, water, easy access, happy raccoons. Skunks love the four-inch gap under a deck, and older places near Roosevelt Park and Old Town have some beautiful decks sitting on exactly that kind of gap. Here's the honest split: mice and rats are absolutely ours, and finding their entry points is the whole thing we're known for. Anything bigger, we hand off. A good wildlife operator will trap or install a one-way door, get the animal out, then close the hole. Ask them straight up whether the price includes the repair. If it doesn't, you'll be doing this again next spring, and you'll be annoyed with both of us.
Honeybees get relocated by a beekeeper whenever it's practical, and a reputable Longmont pest control company will tell you that before quoting anything. Wasps, yellowjackets, and bald-faced hornets are a different story — those we treat, and they're most of what people find on sun-baked south walls in Fox Meadows and Somerset Meadows by mid-August. The trick is telling them apart before someone panics. Honeybees are fuzzy, goldish-brown, and they don't hover in your face while you're grilling. A swarm hanging off a lilac branch looks terrifying and is usually gone in a day or two on its own. Yellowjackets are slick, bright, aggressive near the nest, and they nest in ground holes, wall voids, and under eaves. Send me a photo. Seriously — a blurry phone picture settles it in five seconds and saves you a visit fee. If it's honeybees in a wall void, that's a carpentry-plus-beekeeper project, and I'll say so.
Bats and most native birds are legally protected, so exclusion has to happen in specific windows and no licensed operator should be killing them. Under federal law, most native migratory birds and their active nests can't be disturbed — non-native pigeons, starlings, and house sparrows are the exceptions. Bats matter even more here. Sealing a roost during summer maternity season traps flightless pups inside your wall, and then you've got a smell problem plus dead bats plus a repair bill. Wildlife pros wait for the right window and install one-way exits. If anyone in your neighborhood contacts a bat directly, or you wake up with one in the bedroom, call Boulder County Public Health before anything gets released — rabies testing is a real conversation, not a scare tactic. We'll happily talk with you about the gaps at a roofline, and around Prospect New Town and Lake Park there are some great old rooflines with great old gaps. But the animal itself isn't our lane.
Tree pests, garden insects, and lawn diseases fall outside general structural pest control, and the person you want is a licensed tree company or a turf and horticulture specialist. Emerald ash borer showed up in Boulder County years ago and has been chewing through local ash ever since. Longmont has a lot of ash. Treating it means trunk injections on a schedule by someone who does that for a living, not a perimeter spray. Same logic for aphids on your Ute Creek tomatoes, sawfly on the pines, or those brown patches spreading across a Rider's Ridge lawn every July — could be a fungus, could be irrigation, could be a dull mower blade. Not bugs, usually. I'll tell you honestly when something's over my head, because guessing at your $8,000 shade tree isn't a favor to either of us. One exception worth knowing: boxelder bugs and cluster flies come off the trees but pile up on and inside your house, and that part is ours.
No private company treats public water — the reservoirs, the irrigation ditches, and the creek bottoms fall to county and municipal programs, and mosquito surveillance in Boulder County is a public health function. So if the mosquitoes chewing you up at Union Reservoir on a July evening are coming off the shoreline, nobody's spraying that for you. What can actually change is what's on your own lot. Standing water is the whole ballgame: clogged gutters, a tarp holding two inches of rain, the kid's wading pool, a saucer under a flowerpot, a low spot in the yard that stays soggy because the sprinkler zone overruns. Dump it, drain it, or fix the grade. Larvae need about a week of still water, so a Saturday walk-around genuinely helps. Some companies offer yard mosquito reduction services and some don't, and honestly, expectations there should be modest. Reduction, not elimination. Anyone promising a mosquito-free backyard in Longmont in July is selling you something.