Roaches

Factual Questions
1

This is my second post and promise I won’t overload the system with my thoughts.

But now that I’ve found interesting answers to a link problem my family is having, I’m feeling compelled to ask you all for an answer to a prolem that affects me personally.

Question: My apartment, out of 48 in the building, in an old three story brownstown in the heart of Minneapolis, recently has roaches (I believe this has something to do with the guy below me moving out, but don’t know)

Problem? Question? Outside of being pissed about these little beasties sharing my rent and offending company, my apartment seems to be the only one affected. All my neighbors look at me with disdain when I mention that I’m having a problem controling them.

Now, I’m being serious, I am clean beyond any shadow of a doubt. My friends and family can attest to my fastidiousness. All have commented how much they like the apartment until one of them stumbles upon the little creatures. Then, they seem to look at me as if I’ve done something wrong. Now I’m beginning to believe that I have done something wrong. But what? I’ve sprayed, pasted, caulcked, everything.

To the anonymous masses, what am I missing?

2

Welcome Cnote,

Cecil on roaches.From whence and

eradication

A point in every direction is like no point at all

3

I had a horrible roach problem, and checked
with a professional the best and cleanest way
to get rid of them. This worked: On a day
when it was 4 degrees out, I cut off all the
electricity at the circuit breakers and opened the windows. I left my apartment for
six hours, came back, and cleaned everything.

I haven’t had a roach since. The cold kills
them.

4

Have you tried Boric Acid?

Try this:

Buy a can of Crisco. Get some sugar, and get Boric Acid from a pharmacy. Mix them up in a bowl, or on the counter, and make the mixture into balls. Stick the balls (or paste, or whatever form you make it into) wherever the roaches go.

Boric Acid, while it probably could make you sick if you ate enough of it, isn’t horribly nasty like so many things can be. My doctor and a few other people recommended it for roach control in my apartment in place of chemicals, as I have small children. It’s safer for them - if the kid eats one, it isn’t likely to hurt him.

Roaches, on the other hand, carry the sugar/fat mixture back to the nest, never realizing that boric acid is nasty stuff to roaches.

-Elthia

5

elthia- Yah, I know. I’ve read those articles too. But still, I have to side with the people that think those options don’t work. I mean, How much time am I suppose to spend on these things?
I want to hear from the gut that says that any and all means should be taken to eradicate this nuisance.

Legal or not, I don’t care, I want them DEAD. Their families DEAD. Eveyone they know, DEAD.

6

In light of your enthusiasm, I can only suggest that you burn down your apartment with a flamethrower, or turn to biological weapons. Well, maybe not the former, but the later is a good idea, especially in combination with conventional chemical weapons (e.g. boric acid). Insect growth regulators (IGRs), for example, will sterilize young roaches, and has a good chance of eradicating your local roach colony by the third generation. These still fall within the realm of chemical weapons however, and they do not cause direct and visible mayhem, plus they take some time to be effective. Moving up one level, we can deploy various forms of fungi, protozoa, and bacteria that infect the roaches and cause a slow and painful death. Due to the contagious nature of these biological agents, not only will the first line of roaches die, every roach they come into contact with later on will die as well. Yes, they die, their families die, their friends die, and all who attend their funerals or so much as peek at their corpses die as well. Now you have a grin on your face. That’s the spirit! But wait, there’s more! If you truly want to instill fear into the hearts of all roaches, and let them see death charging straight up at them, nothing beats an army of carnivorous lizards, toads, beetles, and parasitic mites and wasps. So your human neighbors might complain a little about your new minions, but they should be glad you didn’t just use a flamethrower, right? Now to learn more about your enemies, please pick up a copy of the Cockroach Control Manual on your way out. Dismissed!

7

Roaches are misunderstood. They are actually very clean insects.

8

So, would you eat a slice of pie that some roaches had just been crawling all over?

Would you humanely pick up a roach (since they aren’t a nuisance) and gently place him outside without bothering to wash you hands afterwards?

Would it bother you to share your bed at night with a few roaches in there with you?

I’m just trying to gauge how comfortable you are with these “misunderstood” insects.

9

Boric Acid is the only thing that works. I have a roach free apt but only if I follow the following steps:

  1. Find and cauk up ALL holes in your walls are door wells. Put stainless wool into the crack and cauk over it.

  2. Spred as much boric acid as possible and LEAVE IT THERE. Virtually any other kind of pesticide you use the roaches will learn to avoid. I tried the grease balls. It doesn’t work. You need to put the boric acid around ALL baseboards that way they can’t help but run across it.

  3. Seal all food. Put it in the refridgerator or throw it out daily.

  4. NEVER NEVER leave any water around. Roaches need this to live. Wipe up all water from the sink.

Of course this takes time about 6 months but if you do this everyday they WILL disapear. But then again if you’re in an apartment it is only as effective as your neighbors. If they are slobs not much you can do.

10

SMOKE THEM for God’s sake. :cool:

11

My apartment’s kitchen had roaches when I moved in. I bought a few commercial packages of roach baits. They contained both bait stations (which have poisoned roach chow in them) and a slow-acting fumigator type device that is supposed to destroy a roach’s ability to reproduce.

I left these items behind the refrigerator, behind the stove, etc. I strove to keep the kitchen extra clean. After a few months, and a couple of roach-bait packs, the problem had not lessened in the slightest.

One day, however, I watched a roach crawl down the face of my cabinets toward the floor. Instead of crawling down the baseboard between the cabinet and the floor, it dissapeared at the bottom of the cabinet. I checked, and there was a gap behind the cabinet and in front of the baseboard - a gap large enough to stick my hand through. The roaches were living in the enclosed space below my kitchen cabinets and above the floor. I had thought that this space was far better enclosed and that there was no hope of placing poison inside it.

I went to the store an bought another package of roach baits. I tossed most of them through the gap under the cabinets. I tossed in one of the fumigator things too.

The results were dramatic. I think it only took about 3 days for the roach sightings to drop off dramatically, and it was only about a week before I saw my very last roach. It’s been about a year since then, and I haven’t seen even a single roach, dead or alive, since.

My point here is this: It seems to be very important to put the poison in the right place. In my case, the roaches that I spotted were badly lost, and consequently, I put most of the first few packages of bait in the wrong places. If they killed any roaches at all, it was just luck that they did so. Putting them in the home base, so to speak, had immediate and dramatic results.

After reading some on-line material about roaches, I wonder if the cleanliness approach could possibly work. While it can’t hurt to keep the place extra-clean, roaches can survive on such tiny amounts of food and water that I, for one, wouldn’t really have a hope of eliminating them that way. My area is too humid to have a hope of getting rid of all the water, and my old apartment building is sure to have plenty of food (crumbs etc.) in the crevices from 40 years of previous tenants.

If there’s an enclosed space in your apartment that’s very difficult for light to get into, it’s a good candidate for roach HQ.

Good luck.

12

I’ve seen devices that you plug in that supposedly emit some sort of high frequency (or something like that, I can’t remember.) They’re supposed to repel mice and insects. Would these work?

-Neil

13

Lagged, fantastic link! All the roach info a person needs. Hours of reading ahead of me.

Since the majority believe boric acid is the remedy, I’ll give it a try.

The ultrasonic thing doesn’t work, been there, done that-- $20.00 bucks lighter and red cheeked.

14

I read roaches can’t burp so you put some baking soda out for them [kaboom]. Anyone want to give it a shot?

“‘How do you know I’m mad’ said Alice.
'You must be, ’ said the Cat, ‘or you wouldn’t have come here.’”

15

What doesn’t work against roaches from the site posted above (Thanks Zor).

A point in every direction is like no point at all

16

::Test Post. Please ignore this post. If there are multiposts above, please ignore them too.::

17

When I was growing up I used to do my big brother duty and pick on my little bro all the time. Trying to find some kind of effective defense against my “duties”, he stumbled across roaches (we grew up in FL). He would throw roaches and spiders on me whenever I would act up. I fear those two insects to this day…I suppose we’re even now.

Anyway, I used to have to go over to a babysitters house, after school, when I was much younger. This household had more roaches than a Thai prison.

One day I was changing out of my school clothes and into my play clothes, in the babysitters bathroom, door closed for privacy. As I was pulling my shorts on, I noticed something dark on the bathroom door. It was a huge roach (possibly a palmetto bug, but who cares, I was scared) just sitting there, at chest level. I was perfectly motionless, half bent over in the process of pulling my shorts on. Only my eyes moved as I scanned the room for something to kill it with. As my eyes came in contact with the toilet plunger, my heart sank, as the babysitter began knocking furiously on the door, asking me why I was taking so long. The vibrations from the knocking urged the roach to move, and it FLEW right at me. I let out the highest pitch scream I could muster and fell over, with my shorts still around my knees. I did this strange fear/panic/adrenaline roll to get to my feet and managed to pull my shorts up at the same time. I opened the door, ducked under the arm of the babysitter, and was out the front door.

I never changed in that bathroom again, without first doing a schizo exam of the premises.

18

You’ve got a roach problem? I’ve got a good solution. When I moved to NYC, my roomate and I discovered that there were quite a few roaches sharing the place with us. He recommended getting a gecko to take care of them, which I thought was silly but didn’t object to.

BLAM! 2 weeks after letting that gecko loose, we stopped seeing roaches. And since he was eating the bugs for us, we didn’t even have to feed him. It’s cheap, works great, and doesn’t involve a lot of work on your part. I don’t really recommend this if you’ve got cats or something that will probably kill the lizard, but otherwise go for it.

Kevin Allegood,

“At least one could get something through Trotsky’s skull.”

  • Joseph Michael Bay
19

GREAT SITE! Actually mentions freezing the
little buggers, just like I did. And people
don’t believe me!