How to make your home unfriendly to the bark scorpion

There are few things worse than a guest showing up uninvited. When that said “guest” is a venomous bark scorpion and its friends, make sure you’re not unintentionally rolling out the welcome mat.

At KY-KO Pest Control, our technicians are scorpion control experts who can help you remove scorpions from your home.

However, as part of long-term scorpion prevention, we also recommend that you put up the no vacancy sign for scorpions in the following ways.

As one of the most-venomous scorpions on the continent, there’s good reason for Valley homeowners fear this pest. The Arizona Bark Scorpion delivers a potentially life-threatening—but most often, just very painful!—sting.

If you’re going to remove this pest from your home, you need to start by knowing more about them. Here’s what makes scorpions such a dangerous pest—and what some of their limitations are.

Here’s what makes scorpions a formidable home invader:

Built to climb

Unlike other scorpions, bark scorpions are natural climbers that have no issues getting up walls or even crawling on ceilings. They actually prefer an upside-down orientation, known as negative geotaxis. This means they can go just about anywhere and find difficult-to-spot hiding places in your home.

Tight squeeze? No problem.

Most scorpions have difficulties making a tight squeeze. Bark scorpions have no such limitations. They can actually squeeze between gaps no wider than a credit card. This allows them to exploit even small gaps, cracks, or crevices in your home to get inside.

Motivated by the hunt

These scorpions are carnivores. They’re predators, hunting crickets, roaches, and other insects in the night. If those pests are getting into your home, bark scorpions have all the reason they need to follow.

Incredibly hardy

There’s a reason why scorpions, as a species, have undergone relatively few changes since the time of the dinosaurs. Their armor provides them ample protection against pesticides that would kill most other pests.

Here’s a fun scorpion fact: bark scorpions were one of the few things to survive near ground zero of nuclear tests. Needless to say, they’re tougher than most to kill.

Here’s what you need to know about their limitations.

Light up the dark

These sand-colored scorpions naturally camouflage against rocks and stucco. However, all scorpions have a special protein in their armor exoskeleton that causes a weird effect: they glow a bright blueish-green when exposed to UV light. You can use a blacklight to easily spot them in the dark.

If you’re looking for potential signs of scorpions in or around your home, a nighttime inspection with a blacklight is a good place to start.

Poor eyesight

For such effective predators, scorpions have limited eyesight. To navigate large spaces—such as your living room—they’ll generally stick to following walls and baseboards. You can use this to strategically place glue traps along their somewhat-predictable path.

Slow-moving

Unlike cockroaches, bark scorpions don’t move when exposed to light. In fact, they’re generally slow-moving and can often appear sluggish. They rely on ambush to catch prey. If you can see them, you can generally trap them before they escape somewhere inaccessible.

Non-aggressive

Bark scorpions aren’t necessarily territorial. They’ll sting when they feel threatened, but rarely advance on people. Most stings occur due to accidental contact, such as your hand brushing up against a scorpion in the dark.

If you want to win the war against scorpions, you’ll need more than just a can of store-bought pesticide. You need a strategy. Taking out a scorpion infestation often requires a multi-pronged approach, put together by a pest professional—such as the technicians here at KY-KO Pest!

Here’s what you need to do:

Scorpions are predators and hunters on the search for crickets, roaches, ants, and other insects. If any of those pests have access to your home, scorpions probably do, as well, and they have an incentive to find a way inside.

The first step to dealing with your scorpion problem is to deal with your pest problem.

Using a combination of cleaning your home of all easily accessible food for roaches and crickets and insecticide applied by the professionals at KY-KO, you can shut down the easy food source for scorpions.

However, removing the food source isn’t enough. Bark scorpions are unique in that they can actually live for years without food. If worse comes to worst, scorpions will even hunt and eat one another.

If your home offers a suitable habitat, they may decide to ride it out. Which means you need to kick them out.

Bark scorpions can be persistent at getting into places, but they often select the easiest means of getting into your home.

For example, a bark scorpion can fit anywhere a credit card can slide under (about 1/16 of an inch), but is more likely to just enter through the gap between your stoop and your door.

Using caulking and weatherstripping, you can secure this area and gaps around windows and the foundation. If you really want to block all points of entry, talk to KY-KO about a home seal. It’s arguably the best way to prevent scorpions from getting inside.

In the summer, scorpions seek cool spaces to escape to during the day, away from the sun.

This includes hiding under large rocks, under logs, in piles of leaves, and in the cinderblocks that comprises many backyard fencing in Phoenix.

If it’s time to get serious about scorpions, take the fight to them by carefully removing these habitats. Clean up loose debris, and place river rock away from your exterior walls.

Remove any firewood from your backyard and call KY-KO to have us help you apply a permanent cement that seals wall blocks.

KY-KO Pest Prevention is the Valley’s trusted team for scorpion removal, prevention, and control services.

Our technicians have the expertise and equipment needed to remove and kill scorpions, and we offer a free inspection so that you can know where they’re hiding.

Click the button below and fill out the form to schedule a free scorpion inspection with our team.