Between doses

The five percent you can see

Spot a flea on your cat and you've found the tip of something much larger. In an established infestation the adults riding the animal are roughly five percent of the colony. The rest is filed away in the house: about ten percent pupae, thirty-five percent larvae, and half of everything — eggs.

The production line explains the ratio. A female flea starts feeding as soon as she lands and can lay up to fifty eggs a day, around two thousand across her lifetime. They sift into carpet pile, cushion seams and floor gaps, where no comb will ever find them.

Picking adults off one at a time is bailing without patching the hull. Catego's monthly dose attacks the structure instead: adults die within six hours of contact, and the same dose keeps eggs and larvae from maturing, so each month the colony gets older and smaller and never gets younger.

The honest timeline: a heavy infestation takes three to four months of unbroken monthly doses to fully starve out, because the pupae already in the environment have to finish hatching into a world that kills them. Keep the cadence, launder what can be laundered, and the pyramid dies from the bottom up.