Ben Bentley meets the man who meets – and then kills – those unwanted summer visitors: rats, flies, and wasps.

Geoff Rogers, senior pest control officer for Shropshire Council, tackles rats on his rounds

Geoff Rogers is going for the queen and, dressed in an impenetrable white suit and mask, he’s come prepared.

It’s pest season, and right now with wasps at their most prevalent, Geoff, a senior pest control officer for Shropshire Council, is being kept well and truly on his toes with call-outs to infestations and nests.

“We have 40 to 50 call-outs a day for wasps at the moment in the Shropshire county area,” he says during a job at Sutton in Shrewsbury.

“They are early this year for some reason. They started earlier and there is going to be more of them than last year.”

This year has been a bumper one all round for pests, which are defined as creatures that can cause damage and the spread of disease. Apart from wasps, we’ve had a mass outbreak of greenfly, rats and woolly bears. Yes, woolly bears.

“Rats, mice, wasps, and cluster flies come to rest for winter in roof and loft spaces and some people can end up with thousands of them.

“I get a lot of calls for advice for carpet beetles, moths and furniture beetles. It’s nothing we deal with, but you give advice.”

Part of the reason behind increased numbers of pests in domestic situations is our passion for home improvements.

Decking is often a culprit if it’s not laid to keep out pests that can crawl under it and survive in luxury. We all like an attractive water feature in the garden, and so, apparently, do rats.

“We all make our gardens like extra rooms to the house with things like decking, and it cannot be better for pests like rats. It’s ideal, but it’s one of the reasons we get more complaints about rats in the garden in summer months.

“By all means put decking in, but proof it somehow around the sides so they can’t get in.

“We make our homes more attractive to us and it’s more attractive to them too. Then we put bird feed out and a water feature and they think they have come to a four-star hotel.”

Continuing inside the house, Geoff says: “Central heating attracts pests. And nice carpets.

“You get woolly bears which are larvae of carpet beetles. They munch holes in natural fibres and you find pencil holes in your jumpers.

“People think it’s nothing, but it’s woolly bears. Oh, they ruin jumpers.”

Geoff has noticed too that numbers of hornets are rising as temperatures have gone up a degree or two.

“They can be like little Chinooks coming in,” says Geoff.

“They will have you but they are not as nasty as wasps.”

The humble bumble bee, on the other hand, has Geoff practically buzzing.

“We won’t touch the bumble,” he says emphatically.

“I once even moved a nest of them at the crem where someone was being buried. Someone suggested to bury the person somewhere else, but they said they couldn’t – it was a double grave.”

Worryingly for Mother Nature’s finely balanced ecology, we’ve been experiencing a shortage of bees this year, but Geoff is happy to report that he’s seen “no end of honey bees, so I don’t know what’s happening there”.

When honey bees pose a problem they are taken away by local beekeepers.

Then, apart from the colonies of bees, there are the solitary ones – or as Geoff calls them, “the self-employed bees” on account of the fact that they don’t work for a queen. There are mortar bees which create a nest in wall spaces, masonry bees which do the same in stonework, and mining bees that live in the lawn.

“They do no damage and we leave them alone,” adds Geoff.

People ring up for the most daft things and, in their own small way, you might describe these people as pests.

“People call for spiders and woodlice,” says Geoff.

Ants are big one too.

“We have no end of calls about ants, but we just offer advice. You get nests of them and some of them develop wings when the conditions are right and you get swarms of them flying around, but the swallows have a great time on them.”

Fighting the advances of rats, mice and things that sting is not a particularly glamorous job, to be sure, but those who do – like Geoff – are quite unlike the amateurish pest control character portrayed by Steve Coogan in the TV sitcom Saxondale.

Indeed, as anyone who’s ever experienced an infestation of the pesky creatures will tell you, when Geoff arrives at your front door with his box of tricks he is greeted like a knight in shiny white armour.

“I’m so glad to see you,” says a lady householder in central Shrewsbury as Geoff identifies the wasps nest in her hedge and moves in for the kill.

Geoff continues: “We’ve been to homes where people have got bandages on their arms because of the stings.

“It’s a job that’s got to be done because of public health.”

As he squirts contact insecticide into the nest, displeased wasps fly out in their hundreds.

“They look like little ghosts,” says Geoff referring to their new colour, white. But still they return to the nest and ultimately the scene of their demise.

“Their determination to get to the queen outweighs everything else.”

The queen is dead. On to the next job down the road.

By Ben Bentley