 Please go ahead and begin whenever you're ready. Great. Thanks so much, Mike. Hi, everyone. I'm Jessica Unger with Heritage Preservation, and we are so glad that you're joining us here today. Before we get started, just let me give a quick introduction to the community, and then we'll move on. The Connecting to Collections on the Community with the American Association for State and Local History and with funding from the Institute for Museum and Library Services. The community webinars are moderated by Heritage Preservation, and Learning Times is kind enough to produce both our website and our webinars. The goal of the online community has always been to help smaller museums, libraries, archives, and historical societies quickly locate reliable preservation resources and network with colleagues. To help you do that, we have compiled an extensive list of online resources that are broken up by topic on the online community. In addition, we also host free drop-in webinars, like the one today, on topics we hope you'll find useful. A recording of all of our webinars, including this one, can be found under Webinar Archives. And of course, if you're interested in continuing the discussion, you're welcome to sign up as a member of the community and post your questions to the discussion board. Today, I'm pleased to welcome Patrick Kelly. Patrick is the Vice President of Insects Limited, Incorporated, as well as the Identification Group Subchair for the IPM Working Group. Thank you so much for joining us. I'm going to go ahead and pull over to your PowerPoint and just remind folks that if you have any questions during the presentation, feel free to type them up in the chat box, and then we'll make sure to get to them by the end of the hour. Thanks, Patrick. All right. Thanks, Jess. I appreciate it. Thanks, Mike, for getting us set up. And good morning, good afternoon, good evening to everyone out there. I'm excited to be here today and start off our Stressed About Pest Part 1. And we have Part 2 that'll be coming up in a week or so, so there's even more to come. This presentation is going to focus mostly on the management of pests in our museums and historic houses. Damage caused by animals and insects is one of the main sources of deterioration in museum objects. The image here shows a wool rug that has been eaten away by insects. But damage like this occurs daily in all types of collections and museums worldwide. My hope is that this presentation will give you a better understanding of pests and pest issues and how to go about preventing or eliminating them. So in order to understand IPM, we need to understand what factors make an organism a pest. What is considered a pest can be different from person to person. While I was in college, I lived in a neighborhood of older homes that was located off campus. When most of us living there would see a rat in the alleyway of that neighborhood, we'd quickly label it as a pest due to the health and property threats that we thought opposed to us. But there was an exception to this. I got to know a girl who lived on the other side of the alley who raised several rats as pets. And during the summer months, she would release her domesticated rats into the wild to let them interact with the wild rats in the area. She was happy for the socialization of her rats and certainly did not see a pest when she saw a rat in the same alley as me. So some of the main things that make an insect or animal pest are if they cause measurable economic loss, if they cause some type of aesthetic loss, if they cause physical health issues to people or the environment, and finally if they cause mental health issues in the form of fear, stress, or mental anguish. And so our stressed about pest covers that whole aspect right there. Let's take a brief look at the history of pest management since that's our topic for today. Exploration in the nerve gases during World War II gave rise to several new organic compounds that were found to have insecticidal qualities. These included carbamates, organophosphates, and organochlorines, which DDT is an example of that. Prior to this point in time, other means of pest control were used, such as sanitation, mechanical control, such as traps, biological control, which is natural predators of pests. And there was some chemical control, but it was very limited, mostly metal bases like lead arsenic. After World War II, all these practices gave way to chemicals. In the period of the 1940s to the mid-60s, synthetic organic insecticides like DDT were considered modern breakthrough. They increased our food production, removed insects that carried disease, and they were used everywhere. Other forms of pest management were abandoned. The agricultural industry became very high-powered in our society. This ultimately led to a chemical crisis where higher and higher doses of chemicals became necessary as insects became resistant to the chemicals. The US was basically addicted to chemicals, and it was a hard addiction to break. And I'm sure this was happening around the world, not only in the US. Rachel Carson's book in 1962 titled Silent Spring brought awareness of the harm that chemicals like DDT were bringing to the environment. This was the start of the environmental movement away from chemicals and led to the eventual formation of the EPA in 1970. Modern pest management incorporates many alternatives to chemical control, and we owe much of this to Rachel Carson. IPM, the term IPM, was initially a term used in agriculture when other methods, besides chemical use, became necessary. The concepts of field crop IPM has advanced into all areas of pest management. Modern IPM simply means combining cultural, physical, biological, and chemical tools to prevent and reduce pest activity. The image on your screen shows an example of all the pieces that, when put together, make up the IPM puzzle that helps us reduce pest issues. So how do we go about implementing an IPM program at our own institution? Let's begin with our own IPM puzzle pieces and build a program from there. The first piece of any puzzle is often the most important, and our IPM puzzle is no different. We've been around long enough to know that all major decisions in a museum must have approval from the administration, and so let's start there. Educating museum administrators about pests and pest damage is essential for personal support, financial support, and success with your IPM program. Whether they come from administration, curatorial, exhibits, or registration, having one capable person in charge of the IPM program will make the difference in a program succeeding or failing. The IPM manager must have a budget of some type, authority to make decisions, and some expertise about IPM. In a small historic house, the IPM team may be made up of only one person, but in larger institutions, there is typically a team that supports the IPM manager. The team must understand the methods, the benefits, and acceptable pest thresholds for their institution. The team will be able to check monitoring traps and report back any pest activity that they see or hear about. Institutions that do not have this IPM structure in place often ignore the signs of damaging pests until irreversible damage to the collections has been done. Responding to pest activity early prevents damage from ever occurring. Once you have administrative support and a manager and a team to carry out IPM, the next three most important things are education, education, and education. The philosophy of identification of the pest prior to taking any action allows you to make sound decisions on how to get rid of that particular pest. There are many resources available to assist you in properly identifying the insects and other pests that you are finding in your institution. Training courses have been offered at some of the museum conferences to train individuals within your institution about pest ID. The website museumpests.net has lots of really good pest fact sheets and an image library that can assist you with the pest ID. I myself chair the identification subgroup for the IPM working group that sponsors the museum pest net website. So I'm very familiar with this particular resource. Many people post images on the museum pest listserv and ask for input. And companies like Insects Limited will also perform free identification. The bottom line is that there are resources out there to assist you with pest identification. There was even a chance within this webinar for you to submit pest images for identification. And we'll get to those after the end of the formal presentation. We could have a complete presentation on insect identification itself, but we aren't doing that today. Instead, we will take a quick look at a few of the most common and damaging museum pests. One of the most common and damaging pests are closed moths. Shown here, the webbing closed moth is on the left and the case making closed moth is on the right. They eat similar things, but their appearance as adults is quite different, as you can see. Carpet beetles in the family Dermestidae commonly infest museum spaces. They are so common that there are hundreds and hundreds of species of Dermestidae beetles with no common names. There are some that occur more frequently than others, though. Starting at the top left, we have the museum beetle. The top right is a beetle found more frequently in Europe, the vodka beetle. The bottom row gives us the black carpet beetle on the far left, the buffalo carpet beetle in the middle, and the varied carpet beetle on the right. Most Dermestidae beetles spend more than 80% of their life in the larval stage, which is the damaging stage eating the collections. Although some of the images of the adults shown here are similar in appearance, trying to identify a species when all you have are larvae is really tough. Sometimes you have to wait for several months for them to turn into adults before you can determine what species it is. These two look-alike species of beetle both cause significant damage to a wide range of collection materials. The cigarette beetle on the left and the drugstore beetle on the right, or biscuit beetle, as it's called in Europe, bore holes straight in through books, into animal mounts, through antler and even bone to name a few materials. Silverfish and their cousins of firebrats can do extensive damage to paper and other materials, but did you know that they eat dead insects as well? So as we have dead insects accumulate in our storage areas, that's one good reason to have good housekeeping in place and vacuum up all those dead insects. That also the domestic beetles can eat those same things. Cockroaches can also be labeled as museum pest. American cockroaches are common on ships. Actually in 1908, sailors coming into San Francisco from abroad would be wearing gloves to keep their roaches from gnawing off their fingernails while they're slept. So that's one of the nice gross facts about cockroaches. On the right, the lower right is an oriental cockroach, a little smaller than the American cockroach. In order to achieve and maintain a pest-free institution, quality control measures should be in place. One of the most important aspects of quality control is regular inspections of incoming objects and exhibits. Most pest infestations are transported into the museum from other museums or individual collections. A gatekeeper process of screening all materials prior to them entering the museum is key to maintaining a pest-free environment. A physical space such as an isolation room near the dock and procedures to inspect objects with a flashlight before they are brought into the exhibit space or storage areas of your institution will make this process run relatively smoothly and efficiently. Monitoring for pests is only one piece of the puzzle, but it's a valuable piece of that. Knowing where to monitor and what to monitor for will give you the information to make better decisions. A wide range of trapping and monitoring devices are available. The top left and center traps or hanging traps design specifically for flying insects. The upper left is for the indoor use, and the upper center trap is an outdoor trap made of plastic. The two center and bottom pictures on the left are traps designed to sit flat on the floor or shelving. Crawling beetles can easily enter these traps, and the two traps on the bottom right are pitfall traps where the insects crawl up and then drop down into a pit. When monitoring a storage or exhibit space, it's always best to focus most of your time and materials in the areas that house the riskiest and most susceptible objects. These materials include but are not limited to fur, feathers, wool, silk, insect specimens, parchment and vellum, paper mache, animal skins, books composed of any of these materials, dried plants and seeds, sapwood, and any damp organic material. So let's discuss a little bit about how to use either monitoring traps or pheromone traps in this case. We start by looking at a space considering the layout and where our susceptible items are stored. We then place traps out in a grid pattern throughout the area, placing more traps around potential problem areas. Allow the traps to collect data over a day, a week, or a month, however much you'd like to look at the traps, and then check for activity. In this case, the area of highest activity is in the lower right corner of this particular picture. Now we focus more traps around the activity. We recheck these traps after allowing them to collect data from the insects. And finally, we focus our attention on the area of highest capture. Ultimately, it always comes down to a visual inspection to find the source of the infestation. So let's take this theoretical application and actually apply it to a case study. In this particular case study, monitoring traps were used. So just regular sticky traps with no attractant were placed throughout the museum. This is a 6,000 square meter museum. So after the traps were placed out, you can see here in the museum store, we had one single cigarette beetle was picked up on a sticky trap. As I showed earlier, cigarette beetles were considered a major pest in museum environments. Since a cigarette beetle male is extremely attracted to a sex pheromone lure, we placed pheromone traps throughout the museum to try to figure out where the source was coming from. So here you can see some of the pheromone traps we placed out. After several weeks of monitoring, no beetles were captured on the ground level floor, as you can see on the left. But several were captured in the administrative offices in the second level, as you can see right here. So let's see. Here we go. So let's focus our attention on that entire second level. We continued to monitor around the museum, but concentrated more traps around the administrative offices where we had previously captured the cigarette beetles. Only a single trap in the work area of the administrative assistant of the president of the museum caught any beetles, as you can see where the dart is showing there. The traps are really helping us at this point narrow down the possible sources in this very large museum. Zeroing in even further on this particular office space, we placed multiple traps in the offices around the assistant. Ultimately, the only trap that caught any beetles was in this one particular office in the top center of the map. All beetles captured were in a single trap that was in a single drawer within that office. This was the drawer that the trap was in. In reality, this desk drawer is typical of nearly everyone's. It has an accumulation of office supplies and personal belongings. In this specific drawer, though, there is a problem, and we can see it right here. What do we see up towards the top of this picture? And it's a single Hershey kiss wrapped in red foil. It's probably a Valentine leftover from one or two years ago, but this particular kiss has more than just Valentine love to spread. Cigarette beetle bored into and back out of this piece of chocolate, and it has become a breeding ground for a harmful museum pest. As we look inside the kiss, we can see the plump larvae gorging on the chocolate. This is the time where we usually take a chocolate break, but I think we'll keep going. But in reality, this single piece of chocolate accounted for more than 30 adult cigarette beetle in the museum. And we were able to narrow it down with the traps and find this one location in a 6,000 square meter museum. So that's one example of how monitoring can help us. Along the same lines as the Hershey kiss, food sold in the stores and restaurants inside museums is commonly the source of problems that spill out into exhibits and storage areas. You should pay special attention by increasing your monitoring in these particular areas. While we were talking about monitoring, we need to also consider environmental monitoring. Many museums already have environmental monitoring in place to make sure that the collections are kept in a stable setting. Being the ones in charge of our cultural heritage means that we should be looking at our storage and exhibit spaces from the eye of an insect. If an insect enters an area and the food sources and lighting are constant throughout that space, they will migrate to the most tropical areas within that space, tropical meaning those areas that have the highest temperature and humidity. If you have a certain area that tends to be warmer or more humid than surrounding areas in your storage areas or exhibit spaces, this area should also have more visual inspections by the staff and should have more sticky traps in place. Prior to World War II, sanitation was the key component for keeping a structure pest-free. With the increase of organic food supplies and pesticide-free zones, we have had to revert back to this valuable tool in our tool belt. Sanitation and or good housekeeping prevents pests by eliminating food sources and physically removing pests. Sanitation can cover lots of different aspects of a workspace. It can begin with procedures that limit eating to only designated areas in the museum. Eating at your desk can lead to excessive food debris, and food debris can lead to infestations. Also, clutter in and around a museum can lead to numerous pest issues. The practice of piling unused materials in internal or external locations offers harbors areas to rodents, birds, insects, and other pests. Removal of this clutter, like you can see on the picture on the right, it is considered sanitation. Mechanical control of pests can be any mechanical device that has the capacity to trap or repel pests. Please note that when I talk about repelling pests, I am not talking about ultrasonic or electromagnetic repellent devices. Professional pest managers will tell you that there is no research backing up that these types of devices work at all. My recommendation is that they should be avoided at all costs, and the money spent on them would be much better spent on any other aspect of IPM. Mechanical traps for mice placed along walls and close to doors can help remove a rodent that has already entered a structure. Monitoring outdoors for rodent activity can help in the prevention of rodent entry into a museum. Poison baits can be swapped out for non-toxic baits if activity is seen, or snap traps can be placed and set in these outdoor boxes. The photo on the right here shows green-colored rat droppings after they have eaten off a green-colored bait in one of these boxes. Fluorescent-colored non-toxic baits are now available that allow users to track rodent movement and harborage using a black light. The urine and droppings of fluoresce brightly under the black light rays, and you can locate where the rats are coming and going. Excluding pests by eliminating entry points into structures is also very important. Some areas need construction repairs, such as the rotted soffit on the left that has birds nesting above the soffit, or the damaged block on the right that allows rodent or other pests entry into the building. While others can simply be filled with a barrier, such as copper gauze, caulk, or other materials that are impenetrable to pests. A mouse only needs a 1 quarter-inch gap to squeeze into a building. This gap can be beneath a door or through a crack in the foundation or other gaps around the museum. Rats, on the other hand, only require a 1 half-inch gap. Most of the worst museum pest insects only need a gap of a couple of millimeters to gain entry. A close inspection while looking for gaps around the exterior of your museum is essential. Brushes, brush sweeps, and other seals on doors and windows can keep pests from entering. These stiff bristles will prevent both rodent and insect entry. I recommend this over other types of door seals because of the flexibility of the brushes, as you can see here. If you step back away from a door and look for areas where you can see light coming through, that really helps when you're looking for which doors need to be sealed. Large wooden doors, like I find in many historic houses and certain museums, are notorious for having gaps beneath them. This is often due to the fact that they expand and contract quite a bit during the course of a year, depending on the temperature and humidity. Door brush sweeps allow for this expansion and contraction while maintaining a seal that prevents pest entry. Let's talk a little bit about documentation. Any Sound IPM program will record pest activity for month to month. This includes maps of where monitors are located and data sheets that identify which pests are being captured and which traps they're being captured in. Once the pest activity has been documented for more than a single calendar year, you will know what to expect and when to expect certain pests that are typical for your area. And you'll be able to distinguish normal pest activity from completely new pest activity. This information will help you make sound decisions on what means of control you need to do. James Bryant, who's the curator of natural history at the city of Riverside in California, is shown here first identifying pests found in sticky traps and then entering data collected into a database. The programs used to input data can be as simple as a spreadsheet created in-house or there are IPM software programs available as well. Proper identification of the pest is essential as this can assist with identifying the source and potential problems in a museum. ZPest is a free pest software that is a great resource and if you would like your software to incorporate maps and trap locations and photos, there's a pay version called Collection Pest that has all the bells and whistles. ZPest is kind of the bare bones. Collection Pest has all this other stuff incorporated into it. That's available at www.collectionpests.com, which I'm sorry I didn't put that on that slide. Solutions to pest problems or treatments must be dialed in according to staff safety. Guest safety, safety of the object and will also be based on the species of insect and the philosophy of the institution. Here's a list of several treatment options used in museums today. I won't be spending time on this subject today as Rachel Erinstein who is a wonderful conservator and who knows a lot about IPM. She has a follow-up seminar to this one devoted solely to the treatment options for collections and so that one's called stressed about pest part two. Remember that there are lots of resources out there that are available to you at no cost. Museum pest.net is one example of a website that can offer help with pest ID as well as monitoring and treatments and other aspects of IPM in a museum setting. Finally, I want you to all know that the guidelines of an IPM program should not be some rigid and unbending formula. Pest activity can be very fluid and changing month to month and you need to be able to adapt quickly to those changes. My advice is to be creative in your approached IPM and your institution. Don't be afraid to make changes in your methods, treatments and trap locations if you think it will help your overall pest situation. And if possible, make it fun by continuing to learn and interacting with your own staff members or members of other institutions about pest issues. Just briefly, if any of you would like to contact me away from the webinar, I put my contact information here. So that ends the formal presentation. I think at this point, if it's all right with the organizers, I'd like to get into a couple of the pest images and letters that were sent into me prior to the webinar today. So this particular image and this was a certain museum and the message with it, it said, we received a portfolio as a donation from a man in China. The portfolio arrived with a slip sheet showing proof of some sort of bug that had eaten away at the paper. Naturally, I was nervous to put the portfolio into our vault until it had been treated. After consulting experts in my field and discussing it with the Chicago Conservation Center, I learned that the best treatment for it was a double-freezer method. So we threw away the affected slip sheet, wrapped the portfolio in poly and froze it, let it thaw and then refroze it. I'm still a little skeptical that the portfolio does not need any further treatment, but hopefully that did it. I'm curious to hear what other recommendations you would have for an object like this. No evidence of living bugs or eggs were visible on the portfolio to the naked eye. So here you can see some of the damage. If I can find, I think I have a pointer here. I can't find that. But up here above the printed part, you can see some of the area being eaten away. And I think we zero in, actually there you can see the damage quite easily on that paper above the portfolio itself. And when I look at this, it's pretty obvious to me that this damage is silverfish damage just by the pattern, that kind of random pattern. I've just seen it enough before on other paper materials. There aren't a lot of pest insects out there that just eat paper for paper's sake, but silverfish are one of those. And especially a thin paper like this, it's gonna have some maybe possibly coating on it that is good for the silverfish. But getting back to the question that the letter sent in, is this good enough to freeze it? Certainly freezing an object like this is going to kill. If you get temperatures that are low enough, really you want temperatures below 10 degrees and Rachel's gonna cover that extensively in the next stressed about pest format. But freezing is certainly gonna take care of an issue, especially silverfish and most any museum pests. So I guess hopefully that has answered the question of what other recommendations you would have for an object like this. You've pretty much taken care of the insect problem and now it's a conservation problem after that. Now let's jump to the next letter. And this one says we received a portfolio. Well, I'm sorry, that's the last letter. I run an integrated pest management program at the State Library of Western Australia and we've been finding domestic beetle and larvae. We have not been finding these on collection material but in the carpet and on the shelf tracks near the leather bound books. Our theory is that they're feeding from leather rot particles that drop from the book's spines. Do you think this is a viable theory? And so this particular person has also incorporated images which are great because we can do the identification which helps us figure out what the insects are doing. We always like to start with the identification and that points us in the direction. And so if we look on the upper right of this particular slide, we see the two beetles on the top. They have kind of a very dark top and a white hairs on the underside. And these are hide beetle which are actually used in a lot of museums to clean. The skeletal remains, if a museum is going to exhibit a skeleton of any type and they need it to be cleaned, they're gonna put it in and have the hide beetles clean that down to the very bone. And so we see those a lot in museums for that purpose but they can also be a pest because they do feed on hide material and flesh material. The third beetle, the one in the middle below that is actually just a type of ground beetle that's probably just wandered into that space. But then the larva picture to the lower right is certainly a hide beetle larva. You can see at the end of the tail end of that it has the two pointed cersei that stick out and that yellow and black coloration tells us it is a hide beetle larva. So the theory is that they're feeding from leather rot particles that are dropping down into this movable carriage below and that these hide beetles are feeding on that. I tend to not agree with that particular outlook with this pest. Most of the time with this pest, they're looking rather than a dried up old leather, they're looking for much fresher skin and hide material. And my thoughts are there's probably, there's a void I know a lot of times in these movable carriages that there's actually a void space on the other side of each of these rails that runs through and it's likely, I would say that there's probably a dead rodent or some type of dead animal down there that these hide beetle are likely feeding on. Here again, it would take further investigation to verify that but really I've never seen hide beetle or heard of hide beetle feeding on the leather rot that comes in a situation like this. Another letter that came in is one about silverfish and this particular person says, I oversee the IPM program in a large historical home and we have noticed a steady increase of silverfish in the wood and window sills. As housekeepers open the windows each morning anywhere between 20 and 50 silverfish scurry into the cracks and crevices of the wood around the sill. So it's a lot of silverfish around the windows. The indoor environment is passively controlled so designated windows are opened each morning throughout the year and cannot be left closed. We have applied boric acid and diatomaceous earth to a few of the windows that are not designated to be opened and have not seen a reduction in silverfish numbers. I prefer to not use dust in the windows that are open daily. The windows have screens and there is moisture present due to a rising mist on the rear of the building where we see the most silverfish. I rarely see the silverfish on glue boards near the windows. However, I have seen minor damage to wallpaper near the windows. The historical home contains over 700 windows and we do not have the ability to seal every crack and crevice. Are there other practices or treatments that would be recommended in a situation like this? And so this is a common occurrence. I mean, silverfish can be a really bad pest and can cause a lot of damage as this particular person pointed out both in the wallpaper and if there is paper stored in there in all kinds of areas. So let's start again with the insect. We need to go back and know about this particular pest before we figure out what the best ways are to go about getting rid of it. So some of the things we know about silverfish is that they go through, most insects will go through an egg, a larva, to a pupa, to an adult and that's a complete metamorphosis. Silverfish do what we call a general metamorphosis. So they go from an egg to a smaller version of what the adult looks like to a little bigger, a little bigger and so they don't actually go into a pupil stage or a cocoon stage, they just keep getting bigger until they're an adult. But really unique to silverfish is that after they reach the adult stage, most insects don't molt again, but silverfish continue to molt even after they've reached that adult stage. And what that does is it gives us a little more things we can use in our arsenal to take care of it. There are pesticides out there that are very low on toxicity level to mammals, but are called insect growth regulators that mimic the juvenile hormones that insects have. And with an insect like the silverfish that is molting continuously even after it reaches the adult stage, if we apply an insect growth regulator in and around the areas that we know we have this particular pest for very low toxicity and very low interaction with anything else in there, you can really knock this particular insect back. Of course it comes down to, we talked a little bit earlier that silverfish love besides paper, they like to feed on dead insects, so obviously sanitation is always good as if we can keep areas clean and we don't want clutter in those particular areas. A lot of times we hear that silverfish like high moisture areas, really they're in these higher moisture areas because other insects like these higher moisture areas, we have fungus feeders and other types of insects that live and die within these high moisture areas and the silverfish are feeding on these guys and that's why we find them in these areas as well. So they can digest paper, so they're one of the few insects that have the cellulases in their gut to digest paper, but really they thrive, they won't thrive on paper itself, they thrive on the glue, especially some of the older glues that used animal byproducts to make up the glue, the proteins in these glues that are in the book bindings and in boxes, cardboard boxes that are glued together, these are the things that silverfish thrive on and so they like to hide in the corrugation of cardboard. So I would recommend that you look at these types of sources in that particular historic house, try to get rid of that, try to keep the area clean and finally with a situation like that, I certainly would recommend an insect growth regulator being applied to the cracks and crevices around those windows and you might get better control than what you've seen in the past. All right, another letter that came in, this one, it says, I'm the curator of a historic house museum outside Detroit and we recently had an English restoration style chair conserved. It was made in New York around 1927 and meant to look like a genuine antique. The conservator was alarmed to find extensive furniture beetle damage leaving a Swiss cheese like texture in the chair rail. Because we regularly monitor for pests, I wasn't too worried and I could identify that the pest damage was not only old but also purposeful. Much of the antique style furniture of the 20th century was made with wormy wood or rubbed with dirt or beaten with chains in an attempt to mimic earlier furniture. I thought my near scare might be a good example of why monitoring is important and that certainly is. I mean, if you're monitoring and you've had this particular collection object around and you haven't ever seen pest damage, if you all of a sudden look at it and see holes that are riddled in it, you know that it has not been recent because you've been monitoring for quite some time. So that does point out the value of extensive monitoring. So this person said, the reasons they believe the company made the chair with damaged wood because there were no signs of larva beetles or wood powder, which is all great stuff there. The chair is from a set of six and every other one of the chairs in the set has similar beetle holes on the same chair components. And so anyway, that's a great reason of why monitoring can be so valuable to us. Here's a really wild photo and I'm sorry to throw this one on you but it's one that was also sent in and it's a particular museum and it says there was in addition to what we see here which we can see there's a mouse that's been killed by a snap trap on the left and on the right is a scorpion actually. I know where I'm from, we don't see too many scorpions so that in itself is a rarity to me and then we can also see a lot of ants that have come in and are feeding on both the scorpion and the mouse. And so they say the traps here were in addition to 10 other rodents found in traps so there's obviously a rodent problem going on. The traps had not been checked in a few weeks because the museum staff were out of town but this is typical of what we generally find. IPM has been an ongoing problem for us. Our collections are stored in historic stable buildings and despite the employment of exclusion tactics wherever possible include plexiglass doors, wire mesh, et cetera, the problem still persists although it has improved. Due to the size, age and complexity of the building we have a hard time finding where the rodents are getting in and keeping the smaller pests like ants out. Any advice or ideas you could offer would be greatly appreciated. And so given a scenario like this where there's obviously heavy rodent pressure and there's lots of reasons for the rodents to come in to get away from the outside as well as the scorpions which are probably coming in to feed on other insects. My recommendations would be first of all go to the outside and look at what it is, what the environment is out there. We want to take away any types of plantings be it bushes, trees, long grass that comes all the way up to the outside of these stable buildings. These types of plants give pests as we can see here cover the way they can come right up to the edge of the building and then they can find their way in. If you remove or at least make a gap between some of the plantings and the building itself, you can reduce a lot of this pest activity that comes into the building. A lot of museums go to the point where they'll put a large gravel, a large gravel barrier of up to four feet around the exterior of the museum and this barrier keeps the pest away from finding the cracks and crevices that come into the museum itself. We also talked about rodent baiting or trapping outdoors, setting up a bait box. Rodents love to go into these boxes just for Harbridge. They're worried about being seen by a hawk and so they'll scurry from a long grass and they see a big black box and they'll run right into it to protect themselves. And so if you incorporate a snap trap or a bait of some type in these boxes, you can eliminate a lot of the outdoor population that's gonna find its way in. But then it always does come back to exclusion and it sounds like you've addressed this where you can, but sometimes you have to get really creative on how you can block entry points into the museum. And so that would be my recommendations too to kind of look at the outside, see if you can modify that environment to be less conducive to drawing the pest right up to the building. So I think we have time for a few more questions. I'll switch off that last slide because it's kind of hard to look at. But I think I have some questions that I can answer that came in during the talk. Here's the first one from Lindsey. It says, is there any danger of pheromone traps bringing in more pests from the outside? And that's a great question, Lindsey. First of all, pheromone traps are sex attractants that mimic the sex pheromone of the female. And so when you're there attracting anything, it's gonna be the male of the species. And it's gonna be a male that doesn't have eggs, it's not gonna be able to lay eggs in those areas. And so you're not gonna be spreading an infestation, you're just gonna bring an adult male into not a damaging larval stage. And the other thing is too, is if the insects are there close enough to be picking up the pheromone scent and coming in, I mean, they're already in that general area, you need to address the issues that why are they in that area? Is it coming from outdoors? Is it coming from a storage area nearby? But still with that, you wanna keep the pheromone traps away from doors that are opened, doors or windows that are opened on any regular basis, keep them away, because you don't want to draw in any bug really, but the value of the pheromones is still gonna be greater than the risk that you take in bringing in an adult male into the collections or museum itself. Patrick, it's Jessica here, heritage preservation. I just wanted to jump in real quick before we get to the rest of these really great questions and go ahead and post a link to our survey. Hopefully everyone can see that now. It'd be really great if people take the opportunity to fill out the short survey. We look at your responses very carefully and they'll help us to shape future events. So thanks so much and go ahead and feel free to jump back into some of our questions. Okay, thanks, Jess, appreciate it. Another question that popped up says, what amount of time pass for observations over the various areas before the location was narrowed down? This is back to our case study when I used the pheromones. For me in this particular one, I came every two weeks to that museum. And so every other week, I would visit, check the traps and then move traps accordingly. The process between when I found the first cigarette in the museum store and when I located the Hershey Kiss on the second level was probably two months. And so it didn't happen overnight. But narrowed it down, narrowed it down, narrowed it down and finally got to that point. So that was the timeframe. But really, if it's a more pressing issue, you can check the traps even daily. Or if it's something that you don't have the budget in time, it can be monthly or even quarterly that you're checking these traps. The more you check it, the better results or the quicker results you're gonna see. Next question from Dee. Patrick, what IPM measures should be considered in the planning of a museum construction planning project? That's a great question, Dee. And one that we don't often or don't often enough get asked of what should be considered. The Canadian conservation, Canadian Museum of Conservation, they built their whole museum with IPM in mind. And so when they did that, they looked at the outside, they looked at where the plantings were gonna be, they made a barrier around that. There are several layers of protection that the storage areas, actually, insects or rodents would have to go through three or four different sets of doorways and hallways to get even into the museum storage areas. And so it's those types of things, lighting outdoors, how you're gonna place your lightings. Typically, you wanna have the lights away from the structure pointing at the building rather than having security lights on the building which draw the bugs right to the building. So all those things should be considered and prior to construction and every that ounce of prevention goes a long way when you're doing museum planning. Another question, I'm just going down the line here. What's the best way to get rid of brown recluse and other venomous spiders? Spiders are there for a reason. They're there because it's brown recluse in particular. They like attics, they like crawl spaces, they like areas beneath furniture that's always dark and never gets moved. And they're there because there's other food sources. Spiders are indicator pass because they're there to eat other insects. And so the best way to get rid of the brown recluse is to remove their food source and eliminate their environment that they like so much. And so better air circulation, more light, reduce the amount of other insects in those areas is certainly going to reduce brown recluse. And only if you have to, would you look at doing other types of pesticide methods, but with the dangerous insect like the brown recluse, you might look at that rather than having someone get bit and go through the nightmare of what can be a brown recluse bite. Jess, we have time for just a couple more questions. Do you recommend? I'll go ahead if I don't hear from her. You there, Jess? Patrick, can you hear me? Yeah. Patrick, can you hear me? Okay, great. Thank you so much for addressing these excellent questions and I realize that we have quite a few more. Thank you so much for everyone who's been contributing and I want to let everyone know that any questions that we weren't able to address as a part of this webinar will hopefully be able to bring up with our discussion next week with our presenter Rachel who has generously joined in some of the conversation happening in our chat box. I think Patrick, we might have time for just one more question. We've been addressing a lot of questions dealing with insect issues. So perhaps one of the questions that we have to do with rodent infestations. Nicole noted that she recently received a collection of records that a mouse had nested in and she was advised by a conservator to let it set for about 10 to 14 days and which she has done. After she tosses out what is not salvageable, how would she go about sanitizing the rest of the paper? Well, that's an interesting question and I'm not sure why there were questions. There was a 10 to 14 day time to let it sit that I'm not sure what the reasoning for was that. There are, with rodents in the urine and dead rodents in the fecal pellets can be a vector of hantavirus which can be a deadly virus. And so anytime there's a rodent infestation, these things need to be looked at quite seriously and if you have to handle this paper, typically what we're recommended to do is to get a water, bleach mixture and we spray it down. So if it's not the collection piece itself, we spray that down and that suppresses any of the dust and hantavirus is spread through the dust in the urine and fecal matter. But on something that is actually trying to be conserved, here again you would have to protect yourself with HEPA masks and you're probably not gonna, can't use bleach on something like that. That's the better question for a conservator than me of how you go about salvaging these types of papers. But you know that there is a big health hazard with the hantavirus and you wouldn't wanna wear rubber gloves and HEPA masks at the very least and eye coverage even. So I think that answers that question. Wonderful, thank you so much. I'm afraid to say that our time is up but thank you so, so much to Patrick and thank you to all of those of you who are able to join us today. Recording of this webinar and related resources will be available shortly in the community. And our next webinar and the second part of this series is scheduled for Wednesday, September 3rd at 1 o'clock p.m. So we hope you all can join us then but in the meantime, enjoy your afternoon. Thank you so much. Thank you all very much.