Spiders in my house generally get a “keep up the good work, soldier!”.
Silverfish, flies, and ants get squished or otherwise made unwelcome.
Ants: We have had great success with mint plants. They really seem to hate mint so I put it in small pots, and I move the pot to wherever they make nests. Sometimes I pick the leaves and sprinkle them around the mounds. The ants were digging up the sand in the joints of my patio and it only took a few mint leaves to get them to move on. I haven’t seen another nest since Spring… so they are probably in my house now. :smack:
Spiders are gently rehomed. Ants & roaches in the house are killed, however since acquiring chickens, there are far fewer of these.
I wish humanity could find a way to completely eradicate mosquites, bed bugs and lice.
Most bugs get the trap and eject treatment. My daughter is amazed at Mommy’s bug-catching skill. LOL!
With the spiders there’s an agreement: You stay out of the bathrooms an dbedrooms and you can live in peace. Enter those areas and it’s out in the cold with you. Unless you are a jumping spider, a brown wolf, or (of course) a black widow; in which cases you are vacuumed and your pieces tied into a plastic bag. or two.
Nuisance bugs like roaches and ants - sorry, I’ve been to the mat with you guys before. It’s immediate nuclear annihilation for you and your colony. I am not going to fart around feeling guilty and playing the Green Goddess while you build up your forces for assault. Growth inhibiters, baits, traps and all. I’ll hit low, hit fast, and with everything I’ve got.
I like spiders. They don’t bother me, whether inside or outside.
Ants? I’ll only get aggressive if they physically come insode the house, which is very rare. Outside ants don;t bother me.
Cockroaches, on the other hand, give me the heebie jeebies x 10. I can;t stand those things. I’ve lived in various places in the south and have had to deal with them inside and out. There is no death too slow and painful for a cockroach.
Once, I was watching TV and heard a noise. Click-click sortof noise. Dame huge-ass roach walking across the floor. I decided I’d try oven cleaner on it. Burn the bastard with lye or whatever caustic chemical is in oven cleaner. That roach did not die. In fact, I think it was absorbing the oven cleaner to become a mutant roach of destruction. I finally smacked it with a paper or something 100 times, but it gave me shivers just to have to get that close to it.
I’m not sure why this is. I’ll pick up a beetle or a cricket or whatever without any qualms. I generally *like *bugs, actually. Very interesting creatures. But not cockroaches.
IANA Entomologist, but ISTR mosquito larvae are an important food source for several critters, especially including tasty trouts. I don’t think anything wants to eat bed bugs or lice, though I could be wrong.* (wanders off to Google)* Oh wait, look!
[QUOTE=The Wikipedia]
Natural enemies of bed bugs include the masked hunter (also known as “masked bed bug hunter”), cockroaches, ants, spiders (particularly Thanatus flavidus), mites and centipedes…
[/QUOTE]
(Bolding mine.) It’s the ciiiiircle of liiiiiiife!
But nobody seems to think anything eats lice, according to the Goog, so open season on those fuckers.
Oh god Dogzilla, why? WHY!? That story w/ the graphic squishy crunching made me oogie all over. *shudder8
Ants aren’t that scary but they come in hoards which IS scary.
Spiders are predatory and freaky as shit.
Other bugs are so creepy what with the crunchy exterior and the smelly, squishy insides - this creepiness is magnitudes of order worse the larger they get.
twitch bugs freak me out like nobody’s business.
I don’t generally react much to insects. I’ve never had cockroaches. So long as they stay clear of my food and don’t wander close to me I let them do their thing. Spiders can hang in the corner of my room if they want but if I catch them on my desk or bed they die. I’ve had ants and on seeing them spent months thinking I should probably do something about them, but they never found my food and stayed off me so months went by and I guess they moved out.
I rarely would take the time to relocate something. Closest I come is if I find one in my car I roll down the window and flick them out.
A few years ago, I started getting ants in my bed. Just one ant on my skin will wake me right up from a sound sleep. I was sleeping on a futon on the floor; and it turns out the ants were coming in my window in a steady line to … my electrical outlet! <shudder!> That creeped me the heck out. However, since the detouring onto my bed always seemed to involve some tasty confection nearby, I put a clean catfood can half-full of corn syrup right outside my window. They never came inside again.
Also, you can make a thick paste with cinnamon and water, and plug up holes where they come in. It’s worked great for me.
divemaster, you say you’re not sure why roaches gross you out so much. I’ll tell you what it was for me – it’s seeing a fat cockroack facedown, drowned in your formerly tasty glass of Bailey’s Irish Cream, with its wings all splayed out. I mean, yuck. Eeew.
spiders, now … I don’t have time to run down all the anecdotes I’ve got about spiders, but here’s my favorite one: Last autumn, an older gentleman for whom I work as a personal assistant had a spider living in a good sized web hanging from his eaves. (orb-weaver type, looked kinda like a crab.) The eaves were on the 2nd story, so the web was pretty high up. There was a long line coming off the web going almost to the ground, with two small gray oblong things attached to the very end. Aha, I thought, this is his larder, or else he’s getting rid of the husks to avoid tipping off the next bug.
When the spider left the web behind (went south for the winter or whatever it is the too-many-eyed set does in November), I couldn’t resist getting a closer look.
**
They were tiny pebbles**, securely attached to a long line on the bottom of a web that was attached at the top to the eaves, and at the bottom to … nothing!
The spider was using them for ballast.
Great anecdote, Incredible creatures, spiders! Just love them. I’ve heard of them choosing pebbles to attach to, but the ballast version is superb!
Can’t answer the poll. Are people really becoming so alienated from the natural world? That’s more frightening than any little critter in it.
Cockroaches - Rented a shitty apartment on 7th ave in downtown Calgary over a headshop. When the guy showed it to me he pointed out the cockroaches. having never dealt with cockroaches before I figured, “what’s the big deal?” Two days of: sleeping with my ears and nose stuffed with cotton, waking up thinking I’m feeling them on my face / in my mouth, waking up and finding them on me / in my mouth and sleeping with the light on in hopes of reducing their numbers I moved out to the Centre of Hope and got my shit together. Ipaid $150 a night for a cockroach infested room - really not bad for Calgary. Drop the Neutron-Seren-Oblitimatrix on 'em.
Bedbugs - My roommate (who slept on the couch) went to a party and brought home a lady-fair who left him with the crabs - seperate story - and the apartment with bedbugs. Funny thing; some folk don’t react to bedbug bites. Seems I’m one of 'em.
my girlfriend started complaing that she got a strange rash when she crashed at mine but not when I crashed at hers. I figured (I was young and stupid and oblivious to anyone but me) I’m not getting a rash from anything here so you musn’t be. Did I mention I was young, stupid and oblivious?
Skip ahead a few months and: She and I’ve broken up, my apartment has been condemned as unfit for habitation - seperate story and not my fault, my roomate has been evicted for pissing off the landlord and I’ve got a new aoartment in the same building.
Skip ahead a few days and I wake up at around 2:00 am, turn on the light to have a cigarette and read for a couple minutes before going back to sleep. Light goes on and I see something dart out of peripheral vision. I follow to the seam of the matress and find an entire civilization. Slept in the bathroom that night. Next day I called an entomologist and asked if I could swing by and get him to identify a bug. He said yes and within about a second of looking at it he said, “it’s as bedbug - and it’s full of you. See how red the belly is? That’s you’re blood.” He told me malithion and super-Raid would work so I bought 3 cans of super-Raid and a bottle of malathion.
One can of super-Raid went into the couch and one can went into each side of my matress. I poured the pure malathion around the baseboards of the bedroom.
I lived there for two more weeks before I got evicted. I peripheraly know the next tenant and never heard complaint of chemical smell or poison symptoms.
Bedbugs need to be destroyed on the same level as cockroaches - DDT is a kindness and TNT is too subtle.
Ants - I currenly live on a block that appear to have a large colony of Manitoban black-ants (no idea the species) and as long as they don’t build hills too high (found one about 18 inches tall against my shed two years ago - dig out about 36" of ground and haven’t seen one nearly that big since. So long as they are outside I don’t care. Inside the house you die and so do your nearby kin.
Just my experience.
Zeke