Name the animal, and the remedy names itself.
The ninety-day determination
If the species named in your determination letter shows activity inside ninety days of a closed file, the re-course is free — including a new determination, because a return is evidence and the bureau keeps its evidence.
Services & rates
The schedule of fees
Fees unchanged since the 2023 schedule, Gaslight Row through the Lammas flats. The determination visit is credited against any course begun within thirty days.
Household determination visit$85
Specimen taken under the scope, the species named in a written letter, and the course of placement recommended before anything is applied
Ant course — sweet & grease bait matrix$165
Gel stations chosen by species — budding colonies get bait, never spray — the entry sealed, and a two-week follow-up read
Clothes moth & carpet beetle curatory$140
Pheromone lures in the wardrobe, targeted placement in the garment voids, and the freezer protocol written out for what cannot be treated
Silverfish & firebrat course$120
Desiccant dusts in the plaster voids and the bookcase backs — the paper pests controlled where they live, not where you read
Rodent exclusion & trap-out$320 flat
Snap program over two weeks, every gap a pencil passes copper-meshed, sweeps and vent screens, droppings wet-cleaned
The Annual Register$42 / month
Four seasonal visits on the bureau calendar, monitors read and filed, call-backs between
What we do
Three files from the drawer
The webbing clothes moth
Tineola bisselliella does not eat your wool — its larvae do, and a pheromone lure tells you within a week whether a wardrobe holds one generation or three. The curatory runs lures and targeted placement through the garment voids, a freezer protocol for the pieces that cannot be treated, and a vacuum regimen for the carpet edges where the eggs actually are. Mothballs are not on the schedule; naphthalene is a smell, not a strategy.
The silverfish in the plaster
Lepisma saccharina lives in the wall and visits at night, eating the paste out of the bindings and the sizing off the paper. The course is desiccant dust blown into the plaster voids and behind every bookcase — a powder that works by physics, so there is nothing for a population to build resistance against — plus a humidity note in the determination letter, because a dry wall is a wall they leave.
The odorous house ant
The coconut-smell trail across the counter is a supercolony with multiple queens, and spray is the one thing that makes it worse: the colony buds and the problem becomes hereditary. Sweet gel on the trail line instead, so the workers carry it home, and the entry the scouts found is sealed in the same visit. Determination first is the entire trick.
How it goes
A file through the bureau
The same sequence on every job — the only variable is your project.
Day 1
Intake
The visit, the walk-through, the specimen jar. Every bureau file opens the way it did in 1911: what you have seen, where, and since when — with a torch along the skirting boards and a look inside the wardrobe.
Day 2
The determination letter
Species named, common and Latin, with the course of placement and its cost. If the honest remedy is a dehumidifier, a sealed door or a trip to the dry cleaner, the letter says so and the file closes free.
Week 1
The placement
Baits, dusts and lures set where the species lives — in voids, under kick-plates, along the trail lines. Re-entry is forty-five minutes; the placements are drawn on a floor-plan insert.
Week 3
The first read
Monitors and lures read, counts set against day zero, the course corrected or confirmed. The letter goes out the same afternoon, in the same envelope the determination came in.
Quarter day
The register visit
For Annual Register houses: the seasonal sweep — spring perimeter, summer wasps, autumn exclusion, winter attic — and the file grows another page of clean reads.
The bureau, in figures
The determination letter is the whole review. It named the moth, said which garments were at risk, told us to freeze the two things that could not be treated — and the invoice matched the letter to the dollar. My grandmother used this bureau and I finally understand why it never changed hands.
Silverfish were eating the bindings in a library I curate. The bureau dusted the plaster voids, gave us a humidity target in writing, and the paper has been quiet for two years. They also told us what not to buy, which no commercial outfit has ever done.
The ants came back every August for a decade because two companies sprayed them. The bureau baited them instead, sealed the sill they used, and the third August was just August. The file, with both clean reads, sits in the drawer with the deed.
Before you write
Correspondence received
The five questions the counter answers most. Anything further, the bureau replies to letters and telephone calls alike, Monday through Saturday.
Why a written determination?
Because "some kind of beetles" is how a house gets the wrong treatment three times. The letter names the species, the placement and the price before a product is opened — and if the honest remedy is a door sweep or a freezer bag, the letter says that instead, and costs you nothing further.
Are the placements safe around children?
The dusts are desiccants sealed in wall voids; the baits are gels in locked stations and kick-plate voids; the lures are pheromone — the smell of a moth, and nothing else. Re-entry is forty-five minutes after placement. Every letter lists products by name, and the safety sheets ride along in the same envelope.
Do you still take the old-fashioned jobs?
Wasps, rats, mice, cluster flies — the schedule has carried those headings since before the war, and the methods have improved under them. What the bureau will not do is a calendar spray, a fog of a room somebody sleeps in, or any treatment the determination cannot justify.
What is the freezer protocol?
Wool that cannot take a placement goes into a chest freezer at 0°F for two weeks in a sealed bag — every moth stage dies and the garment is unharmed. It is free advice in a determination letter and the single best thing anyone who owns a wool rug can know.
How does the Annual Register work?
Four seasonal visits keyed to the bureau calendar, monitors read on each, call-backs between them, and the file — every letter, every count — kept at the bureau and copied to you. Houses on the register for five years or more get the winter attic visit at no charge; the ledger says so.
The counter answers Monday through Saturday · determination letters within 48 hours of the visit · (555) 033-6508 · bureau@lanternwickpest.example
Open a file
What you have seen, where in the house, and since when — a specimen in any sealed jar triples the speed of the determination. bureau@lanternwickpest.example