The word “insecticide” refers to any product that is designed to actually kill a pest insect in some way. The word “pesticide” refers to all products that kill including ‘herbicides’ that kill weeds, ‘fungicides’ the kill fungal spores, and ‘insecticides’ that kill insects. The terms can be confusing. If you want to kill bugs, you want an ‘insecticide’. In many cases, you can solve a pest insect problem without having to go to that extreme.

An astounding statistic is that 98% of all insects never survive to full maturity. They succumb to the songbirds, to the beneficial insects that feed on pest insects, but mostly they die because of the weather. It can be too hot or too cold or too wet for a particular species at a particular time of the year; result is many dead insects. Of those 2% that survive, only about 5% of those survivors can be considered potential problems in the home landscape. In other words, in most cases, you don’t have to blow away the neighborhood to solve most pest insect problems.