The three most common types of fleas that you will encounter are the cat flea, dog flea and more increasingly the bird flea. Fleas tend to be around 2-3mm long, red to brown in colour and have a flat body, and as we all know fleas can jump as they have well-developed jumping legs.

Fleas primarily live on their host, usually your cat and dog, but will bite and feed on humans, especially if the animal is removed from the home. The female flea need only mate once in her life and fertilise all her eggs, she then will need a blood meal prior to laying a batch of around 20-50 eggs per feed. These will simply fall off the host, hatch into larvae, pupate and then hatch into a new adult flea. This can take as little as a few weeks to a few months’ dependant on humidity/heat and food source!  The pupa stage of the flea can however lay dormant for many months until a suitable host is walks past.  This is usually an issue for people who are moving into new properties where a previous flea issue was present and not contained as the simply fell the vibration of new hosts and hatch ready to feed.

Most poisons will kill some of the life stages but not the pupa stage as this is well protected in a cocoon. To break the cycle, we advise a residual spray which will sit on the floor coverings and surfaces for a period of weeks and will control the emerging fleas as they hatch. Couple this with knockdown products such as smoke bombs which take out live adults you can then control a flea infestation within a few weeks.  

Remove Pests has a variety of Smoke bombs and sprays as well as powders to assist in the control of your flea infestation.