As anybody who lives in the South knows, if you have a house it has roaches in it. (Call them palmetto bugs if you want to - they’re giant flying cockroaches.) I haven’t had a roach problem at all since I got my cats. The remains of the ones post-cat-attack I see are the big American cockroaches. Occasionally I’ll see one free range, but not for long. The cats take care of it.
Suddenly, we have those little nasty German cockroaches, and the cats are Not Interested. My god, I opened up the pizza that wasn’t an hour old this evening and there were two of those nasty little bastards in there - something has Got to Be Done, as our mammalian pest control is clearly not working. Urgh. I’ll go try the whole boric acid thing tomorrow.
My question is, though, what happened to the big patriotic American dudes, and why have they been replaced by these more numerous foreign nasties? (We were out of town for a few days and now that we’re back we’ve seen five or six of them - never saw them before at all. I feel like I need a shower only I just saw one in the bathroom.) Why did we so suddenly get infested, and why these? (The cats stayed here while we were gone, so it isn’t the sudden absence of toothy predators.)
Well, they travel in pizza boxes and the like (especially cardboard used in beer cases, as I understand it). IMHO corrugated cardboard is a great place to stash the little ones, but they could be in non-corrugated take-out boxes as well. I usually take food containers right the hell out of the house after emptying the food out and before sitting down to eat.
In my experience, the three likeliest routes of invasion are pizza boxes, beer cases, or college students moving in nearby (in order of increasing likelihood).
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My boyfriend woke me up in the middle of the night last night. “I know! I know where they came from?” I was asleep, so I thought he was talking about the dead puppies in the nightmare I was having. (He wasn’t.)
The neighbors got evicted last month. The guy we saw cleaning the house out (the owner’s son) said the place was absolutely disgustingly filthy. I bet they bombed the house over the weekend now that they’re done hauling all the crap away, and the little refugee roaches packed their bindlestaffs and moved one door over.
The question is, where did they get these nasty little suckers? I don’t know anybody who’s ever had them here - just the big ones that fly. I’m actually acquiring an odd affection for the giant cockroaches that fly, having now seen the little ones that don’t.
And Sailboat, why did you have to tell me that? Please allow me to go on thinking that the first piece of pizza I had was uncontaminated.
We had the same experience twice when messy neighbors moved out. The first guy gave us mice as well as cockroaches. In their cases it was leaving dirty dishes or pet food lying around the house all the time. The second couple had a Rottweiler that was home by itself all day with a bowl of nice, smelly dog food.
Our pet food is all safe in plastic things (reach your hand into a bag of dog food JUST ONCE and have a roach crawl up your arm and you’ll buy some too) but we’re messy people, and of course pretty much every house is going to have something a roach likes to eat. I’m having a hard time sourcing boric acid, though - the grocery store didn’t have any, and Himself tried Wal-Mart (but you know he’s no good at shopping). I suppose 20 Mule Team isn’t the same thing?
i’m not sure about the 40 mule team. i will share the fun la cucaracha fact the terminex man told me.
american bugs are more interested in eating than reproducing. german bugs are more interested in reproducing than eating. this explains the size and bug amounts.
i suggest y’all bomb your abode and send them to the next safe haven.
try the drug store on the boric acid. it is used in eye washes.
Don’t bomb your house. It’ll drive the bugs out of the walls and you’ll have more; also, the survivors will be immune to the poison next time. Boric acid is available at the grocery store in the aisle where they have Raid and mousetraps and stuff. Look for Roach-Prufe powder. Combat Gel or bait stations are even better.
In my store Borax is with laundry products and is under the brand name Borateam. Works well on fleas but I don’t know about roaches.
I have also been told those roaches like to come in to your house in brown paper grocery bags but since so few stores use them any more maybe that’s not an issue any more.
Good luck on solving your problem. My cats eat any insect that moves so maybe you just need a new cat.
My brother had a chameleon that just loved roaches. During the day it looked like a plastic ornament that hung, unmoving and unblinking, from the living room curtains. But by night it skittered back and forth across the floor like a Jack Russel terrier, joyfully hunting roaches all night long in an insectile version of Jurassic Park (“Chameleon doesn’t want to feed – it wants to hunt.”)
I should also warn you about getting into a chemical war of escalation with the roaches; you’ll lose. I lived in one place with a roach infestation so bad that at night I could hardly sleep because of the constant scritch-scritch-scritch noises all around the room. I eventually went door to door, asking others if they were having the same problem. My next door neighbour turned out to be a blind man whose apartment was in perpetual darkness and had dirty dishes full of decomposing food heaped all around. “Nope,” he said, completely straightfaced, “haven’t seen any.”
The landlord refused to spray (they had just sprayed two months earlier, they said, and they wouldn’t spray again for another four months) so I started buying bug spray.
I started with generic, store-brand bug killer, and that worked for less than a week before the roaches began laughing it off. Then I switched to Raid, which worked for two or three weeks, and then I noticed the spray started to only slow the roaches down instead of killing them outright. I upgraded to Black Flag, which had a stronger formulation, and got another month or so of usefulness before the roaches adapted to that too. Finally, on the advice of a hardware store clerk, I got Green Cross, which has the strongest formulation allowed by law without a license. Within another month, I was watching roaches trundling across the floor carrying ten times its weight in Green Cross foam on its back, like an ambulatory whipped cream roach sundae.
Then I said, “Fuck this noise,” and moved out. I left almost everything I owned behind, including my comic book collection, all my collectibles, my old photograph albums, and most of my clothes.
That’s because you can’t get rid of them if you share a wall with somebody. When we lived in a condo that shared one wall when I was a kid, you’d come downstairs to the kitchen in the middle of the night and flick on the light and it was like somebody opened the doors to the world’s nastiest K-Mart at 5 AM on Black Friday. A sea of movement. And that’s the big dudes, which you rarely see in such extravagant numbers. (We’d spray and all, but they’d just go next door and come back.)
I put down baits (which my dog promptly tried to chew, so now the house has damned quarantine zones) and I did find boric acid, although I had to hit Wal-Mart for it. Guess Publix is too good for it. There’s a large gap between the cabinets and the wall where I was especially zealous - I’m sure that’s the roachy juke joint.
Of course you can. Simply lay down a barrier of powder or surface spray. That won’t top them entering your area, but it will mean they die within an hour of doing so.
It’s really infuriating - I KNOW those little bastards are still there, but now that we cleaned the kitchen to death the clutter isn’t there for them to hide in and they aren’t showing their nasty little faces. I want to know they’re there or not there, so I can put the pizza box down again.
Just lay down boric acid on all the places the counters join the wall, each other, and the floor, any cracks you can find, under the sink cabinets, and anywhere along the molding, with the ruthless overkill of General Curtis LeMay firebombing Tokyo. You don’t want a dusting, you want heaps of it, little berms they’d have to climb over. Like a tiny mound of skulls left as an awful warning by Mongol conquerors.
Sufficient application of boric acid, cleanup of food, and elimination of water sources (no dripping sinks, etc.) has worked in every case I’ve personally seen so far.
The University of Kentucky’s ag extension website disagrees - they say you don’t want piles because they won’t trundle over them. They said to apply a fine dusting. My kitchen is now finely dusted in a Dresden-like manner, but I don’t know who to believe - some people, including Cecil, advocate the “bury the linoleum” method, and some agree with Kentucky. (I also put out baits all over the place, as ordered by them Kentucky guys. What can I say? It was the first search result.)
Curtis LeMay would approve.