Where I live, there are American cockroaches. The good thing is that they don’t nest in homes, so their presence isn’t a commentary on your cleanliness. But they do wander into homes looking for food. And guys, they’re huge! Like you can hear them crawling.
I asked the pest control guy if there was a way to be finally rid of them and he said “move”.
I’ve had fruit flies before that must have come in on some produce, have to be on it to clear them, leave out any fruit/veg scraps and they come out (out being tossed in the trash/green bin too, anything open air). Drop of dish soap, water and vinegar in a high walled glass or jar is the way to do it, I used balsamic but malt or wine vinegar works too, just leave that out and it’ll do its job.
My current place we jokingly call the spider house, have a bunch of house spiders around (cats love them) and a few orb-weavers, garden and wolf spiders outside, pretty much anything native isn’t a threat to humans or cats, they do a great job of taking out any pests, rarely see flies inside these days. Spiders and centipedes I’ll leave alone, they’re beneficial to have around.
Had a mouse issue. Found the hole where they were getting in. Couple of kill traps and blocking the hole with rodent repellent spray froam and they haven’t been in the house since.
Old house. Mice are seasonal for us. We get one or two in the fall when they start looking for shelter for the winter, and again in the spring when they start exploring/multiplying. We used traps, Now that we have cats though, they mostly stay away or get caught.
Childhood spring one year, conditions were perfect for millipedes. The basement floor was covered in them. I mean covered with the floor barely visible.
They weren’t damaging or dangerous, just disgusting. My dad put on his outdoor shoes and just walked around in tiny steps smashing them. He walked for hours. Then scraped them up with a plastic snow shovel and threw them outdoors for the birds to go wild. Then walked some more.
No other spring since has resulted in those sorts of numbers. It was interesting to see my dad’s reaction: the disgust and fascination and satisfaction. God help him if he ever discovers pimple popper videos and the like, we would lose him to the algorithm.
I think i would handle that with a shop vac. Suck em up, take the vac outside near the bird feeder, maybe even prime the birds with a little scattered seeds, then open the shop vac and walk briskly away
This is one of the worst things I have ever read
Why, thank you. Your comment is worth more than all the upvotes.
This deserves to be in a movie. I don’t know the genre or plot, but it would be one of those scenes you never forget.
Homework assignment for a film class: design this vignette in the style of various directors, from Cronenburg body horror to Wes Anderson grief-filled comedy and color palette.
Millipedes or centipedes? I always used to get the names backwards, but centipedes are the nightmare fuel one (to my mind), lighting fast and all legs. Millipedes, the legs are less dominantly noticeable an I think of as more of a forest-floor, under-a-log kind of thing.
I just found and smashed a couple of centipedes in my house the past couple days. My reaction is instinctual and violent. It freaks me out to wonder what they’ve been eating to get so large.
Pretty sure it was millipedes. Lots of little legs that go down below the body, versus fewer legs that stick out to the side. And they smelled when squished.
Thankfully, only ants have been the worst we’ve had so far. Liquid ant baits take care of them in the house, while mound killer granules take care of the ones outside. There’s the occasional tiny scorpion in the house every few weeks in the summer, while the bigger scorpions and spiders sometimes show up in the garage. They’re usually easy to kill because my garage is relatively empty, so it’s easy to chase them around.
I had a pair of foxes raise a litter of kits under my garden shed. They were so cute and fun to watch!
Well they left me with fleas. I had to seal off the foundation of the shed, cut holes in the floor, and drop some nasty pesticides (phosgene) under, and seal it back up.
Cockroaches. It was bad. They were everywhere. You couldn’t open a door without them falling from the cracks in the doorframe on your face.
Boric acid is what helped as recommended by reddit. We used to clean, and spray with Pyrethrins before that but that only kills the visible ones. Most of the roaches are in their holes and you’ll never reach them like that.
What’s great about boric acid is that it kills slowly meaning they can infect each other before they die in a chain reaction. They infect even the hidden ones when they go groom each other.
So clean the area, dry it, then just spread the powder where they usually hang out. It’ll take a week to notice any effects. Apply again if area gets wet.
Another great thing is unless you ingest a huge amount or inhale it in your lungs, boric acid is mostly safe for humans. Unlike the sprays which always gave us symptoms.
mine was these roach gel baits when we had an infestation of tiny cockroaches (around 12-15 mm in size)
just apply a pea size every 2 ft where light cant get them (and your pets), cover or hide any other food sources like trash or table scraps them bam! you’ll be sweeping swarms of dead roaches several days after.
then repeat application every 6 months
We got Carpenter ants around the front entrance to the house one year, had to call an exterminator to spray the nest, which was outside under the front porch. Those little fuckers stuck around for weeks afterwards, which is apparently how long the poison takes to eradicate them all.
We pretty much always have mice in the attic, despite the exterminator calls and the snap-traps we set. Occasionally we catch one in the garage. They never manage to infiltrate the rest of the house because we have 5 cats and each one lives for the moment a mouse is spotted so that they can catch it and play with its barely-breathing corpse before they try to eat it. We don’t use rodent poison for that reason, just in case the cats get one.
Wasps nested in my walls. I sucked them out with a Vacuum then put in some insecticide.
Here is a picture of the wasps in my vacuum:
Well that’s nightmare fuel. Cudos to you for sorting it.
It was pretty bad. Every day a few wasps would find there way inside the house through lightning fixtures. I was freaking out, but some googling and advice from friends helped me sort it out. When I went outside I was able to quickly identify where they were coming in since there were so many wasps coming and going. The vacuum made them furious but they just kept attacking the nozzle and getting sucked in. Once I had sucked up the bulk of them it was safe to inject some insecticide and then eventually caulk up the entrance.
Did you use an extra long hose attachment? Wear some type of protection? That would be super scary! They can be so aggressive! We had some that chased a friend across the yard.
I wore a hoody with a mask and glasses to protect my face at first, but needed none of that. The wasps exclusively attacked the nozzle and at no point came anywgere near me.
Termites.
Mutiple professional treatments to eradicate them from the property and surrounds, then major structural repairs, for which the place had to be vacant.
0/10, do not recommend.
Out of curiosity, were you on the hook for the entire cost? As it, was any of it covered by insurance?
It doesn’t sound like much fun at all.
Generally insurance won’t cover something like that.
Got the occasional mouse, but I usually only notice after my cats got to them first.
Or they hunt them outside and bring the corpse back, really couldn’t tell.
Not me, but my parents, though I discovered it during a visit.
Bats. They had a bat infestation. This was up at the highest point of the house in the loft, they were remodeling and left the walls open - a hole to the outside let one in, and I guess a bunch decided it was a nice place to hang out. There were dozens.
As for dealing with it - bats are endangered, so you can’t exterminate them. If I remember correctly the total spend was just over 10 grand. This also included installing multiple permanent one way doors so if any bats manage to get in again, they have multiple ways to get out.
The only thing I ever had were food moths, after leaving an open container of flour out and putting it away after a day. It was pretty disgusting having their larvae crawling around, but luckily there are parasitic wasps you can order that kill their eggs (they look like tiny specks of dust, not normal wasps).
Parasitic wasps sound scarier than moths.
Sounds scary, but it was literally tiny specks of dust that moved in my pantry. Nothing that was identifiable as an insect. And after the moths died out, they also died out by themselves.
Rats. Killed two a night with traps. They’d keep coming.
Got a cat.
