Ugh, I give up. For months now we’ve been battling an infestation. I don’t know what they are and I haven’t been able to capture a picture of them. They are NOT our familiar cockroaches - not the big American “Palmetto Bugs” nor those nasty little German cockroaches which we had the privilege to encounter when our neighbors from elsewhere got evicted and then fumigated.
The cats won’t touch them. They keep coming back and coming back and coming back. They don’t care about roach traps and boric acid doesn’t seem to bother them much. The largest ones are about the size of the little German cockroaches, but the smaller ones are very tiny. They have wings but don’t seem to fly. They’re caramel brown. They like to lair in places like the underside of my AeroGarden, by the motor under my pets’ fountain, and now I find under the clock radio in the living room. Their poop smells nasty and there’s a lot of it in their little lairs. I believe they may have first entered the house in a bag of potatoes.
This is in Columbia, South Carolina (but again, these bugs are new to me so they may not belong here.) They love to drown themselves in glasses of wine and try to get you to drink them. (Sometimes when I go to bed I leave a glass with a sip of wine in it as a honey trap and always find ten or fifteen dead ones in it in the morning. Bwahahaha.)
What are they? What is their weakness? How do I kill the holy crap out of them? I have three cats and a dog and don’t like to use poisons around the house because of them, but that spot-treatment syringe of gel Raid stuff applied under the AeroGarden did not do the trick.
You might try diatomaceous earth. Non-toxic to humans and pets. Wikipedia says it works by absorbing lipids from the insect’s waxy outer coating. Others have told me it acts as an abraisive, grinding the waxy exterior off as the bugs crawl through it. Either way, the insect dies from dehydration, so the action is mechanical, not toxic. I’ve used it on ants, weevils etc., and it’s said to work well on bedbugs. Slower-acting than toxins in my experience, but quite effective.
SS
A photo would help a lot. It can be hard to convey the characteristics of a bug in a way that distinguishes it from 100 million other possible bugs. Could they be termites? Apparently there is quite a problem going on with them in your area right now. They can be found inside homes if there is an infestation going on outside or underneath. They can live anywhere there is darkness and moisture and some kind of cellulose to eat (wood, paper, cardboard, even some plastics). The winged adults could roughly fit the description you provide.
The little bastards are happy to flaunt their nasty asses when I don’t want to see them, but when I have a camera in hand they’re speedy as hell. I keep getting a blurry picture of a little dark blob.
ETA - oh, not termites, at least not the termites I’m familiar with.
If you don’t mind the smell of WD-40 yourself, you might experiment with it as a killer and preventive. I discovered that it worked well with ants and could be sprayed into holes where they ran into. Before long, they disappeared.
At a guess I would say brown banded cockroaches, though it’s impossible to tell without a photo.
If you have large numbers of roaches, baits simply won’t work. You need to reduce the numbers first. Just buy some residual surface spray for Pete’s sake. The stuff is less toxic than most of the crap your cats eat, including the cockroaches, which they will be eating.
If you are real paranoid treat one room at a time, keeping the door closed to keep the cats out until it is dry. Once the shit dries it forms a crystal solid that ain’t coming off in a hurry.
Use a product that is many hundreds of times more toxic than any readily available pesticide. A product that has never been tested for this use. A product that is highly flammable. A product that is well known for staining and damaging almost any non-metallic surface that it comes into contact with, including but not limited to wood, paint, plastics ceramics and leather. A product that is at least ten times more expensive than a registered pesticide.
I am surprised more people haven’t tried this wonderful solution.
Actually I’m not. I am surprised that, with people like you around, there aren’t many more cases of people being poisoned or burning their houses down or causing permanent damage to buildings.
No, they won’t eat the damned things. They gleefully devour (after a lengthy “enhanced interrogation”) the giant flying Southern cockroaches and then hork them back up in a sort of do-it-yourself 3D puzzle, but these bastards they disdain.
I would also try this. It really works. I’ve tried it to great success. But the thing is you have to allow the bugs to be and to crawl through it. You have to use only a light sprinkle. If it’s a lump the bugs walk around it.
So you use a dusting the bugs crawl through it. If you can’t place it so the bugs will crawl through it, it is useless. And it doesn’t kill ASAP as the quoted poster said.
It also doesn’t work once it gets wet. And if you use it outside, remember it kills anything with an exoskeleton, both the bad and good bugs
These are also called palmetto bugs. If they really bug you, and I imagine they would, let an exterminator handle it. Exterminators use chemicals non-toxic to pets.
No, no offense but I’ve said several times that they are NOT palmetto bugs. I have lived in South Carolina for most of my life and I can spot a palmetto bug from a mile away. Two miles if it’s flying.
ETA - the brown banded roaches look right except they don’t have bands, and Wikipedia claims the bands are quite noticeable. These are solid colored.
I realize this may be overdoing it, but could you perhaps set up some sort of motion-sensing camera to catch these little buggers in the act?
If they are cockroach-esque, then I suggest you get rid of any extraneous paper products (especially cardboard boxes) you have lying around. Those are prime critter breeding grounds.
I seem to remember people suggesting jalapenos as a critter deterrent. And of course your animals won’t touch the stuff, at least not after the first time they get some on themselves.
I’m at my daughter’s in northern Illinois and she has something called boxelder beetles in the house. They look like roaches, but aren’t. I realize I am nowhere you geographically, but google those and see if that’s what you have. She said they showed up this summer.
No - those are kind of pretty, actually. My bugs are ugly, body and soul. And evidently having their Christmas elsewhere, as I haven’t actually seen one all day.
They know you’re talking about them on the internet. Therefore, they must have a working PC somewhere. Obviously you need to add more security to your wi-fi. They’ll get bored and go outside to play, solving your problem.