We have effective pest control for roaches, probably developed around the same time. Using growth regulators like Gentrol make it so the cockroaches can’t breed effectively, so after a generation or two they go extinct. Somehow roaches got into our suburban home and I was able to destroy them using this method. Pesticides and roach bait didn’t do much — the growth regulators were key in permanently removing the infestation.
I’d guess the difficulty in a place like New York is similar to the problem I’m having with mice because we have a forest behind the house — an essentially endless reservoir of new roaches living in the pipes and throughout the city.
Source: was professional exterminator about 15 years ago. Growth regulators were the only thing that worked.
Speaking of New York—everyone’s story with roaches is that they get them when a new neighbor moves in. You can’t get rid of roaches in your apartment as long as your neighbors contribute the steady stream of new roaches.
Interesting, that makes sense. I lived in an apartment with 8 units back in my exterminator days, and my landlord was more than happy to let me in to all 8 of them to do a thorough spray.
It was much harder to spray apartment complexes with hundreds of units and treating for roaches in every single unit was prohibitively expensive (or my boss was a cheapskate, I don’t know), so we’d only do targeted treatment where we had seen roaches and surrounding units.
Single family homes were much easier to treat. I strongly suspect we got roaches in our single family house when a home care nurse brought them with her, along with a bed bug! I almost died when I saw that monstrosity, luckily we avoided an infestation, those are 10x worse than any cockroach. You do not want bed bugs.
I once had bed bugs, and can attest to how nasty they are and how difficult to get rid of. Eventually we learned that none of the bed bug repellent products work, and the only thing that actually works is diatomaceous earth.
Ivermectin actually works, as long as everyone in the household takes it for at least two weeks (length of the BB lifecycle).
Isn't it safer to have control mechanisms that don't involve taking some drug ourselves?
Effective control methods include:
- Heat: improper heat treatment has caused house fires
- All sorts of poisons: poisoning not just the bugs
- Diatomaceous earth: Using the wrong kind, or using it improperly can cause diseases like silicosis
And all the creative yet incredibly stupid things people think of when they are desperate.
But done properly these techniques work with minimal risk. The same can be said of Ivermectin.
Don’t forget the use of organophosphate insecticides in the form of Nuvan Prostrips, which are chemically similar to nerve gas for humans.
BTW Cimexa is the current best practice for desiccating bed bugs upon contact, and, unlike diatomaceous earth, is approved for use in human living areas.
Interesting that it works. Some quick googling shows that it only slows them down. For example: [1].
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6901371/
There are multiple studies so far showing that it works; they can become paralyzed as well as prevented from maturing into adults, which effectively ends the reproductive cycle.
So it seems they discovered an anti-dote to roaches, but not to bed-bugs.
Is there any hope? C'mon science, do your thing!
Heat, Bedbugs die at 119-125 degrees fahrenheit after a few hours.
I put 6 propane gas blowers in an apartment, the kind that is used at construction sites. Let that run with thermostats and cameras for a few hours. Bedbug free. Have since done it at 2 other apartments after months of infestations, immediately fixed.
Source: personal experience, after trying lots of other methods.
https://www.orkin.com/pests/bed-bugs/does-heating-or-freezin...
Achieving that temperature in a home would be nearly impossible unless you live in very hot summer area and likely cause substantial damage to a lot of things.
I've done it in Vermont USA in the summer with all windows closed.
Infrared saunas are 120-140f.
https://www.saunasociety.org/sauna-experience
A car reaches 120f on a 70f day in the sun in 90 minutes so I don't think that temperature would damage that many things.
https://www.scottsfortcollinsauto.com/how-hot-do-cars-get-in...
This company selling electric bed bug heaters says 7 minutes at 115f.
https://convectex.com/pages/bed-bugs
Yes heat is an effective treatment. I've also seen 10kw Resistive load banks used in load testing of single or three-phase AC power systems utilized this way. They are essentially bed bug killers as they generate a tremendous amount of heat.
https://mosebachresistors.com/products/bed-bug-heaters
We got bedbugs once at my old place. We think we just randomly picked them up at a Marriott we stayed at a few weeks prior to noticing them - crap luck.
We got rid of them by sealing the mattress for 6 months, and letting them starve. This was after taking a pass at them with sprays and such (the ones we could spot).
Did you ever notice most all hotel and motel rooms come with a chromed luggage stand? The chrome makes it impossible for bedbugs to climb up and into your luggage.
I learned that too late! But yes, this is an amazing piece of knowledge not well known.
Cockroaches can be imported by a person? How on earth does that happen.
Coffee makers. I once picked up a nice, high-end Keuring machine for free from a neighbor. Later than evening, I noticed something moving around it. It was full of roaches. I put it in a trash bag and ran to put it in the garbage outside. The exterminator and landlord both said the warmth and moisture of coffee machines is a magnet for roaches and coffee is their favorite snack.
One more reason to ditch the kcups for the real thing using a french press or pour over. Use a percolator if you must but ditch those kcup machines. They make tiny single serve french presses.
Coffee grounds, cardboard, paper, compost, all favorites of the American cockroach.
It probably doesn't help much against a roach infestation, but fully automatic espresso machines make a good cup and keep the convenience. Ours was $1500 and has already paid for itself buying whole beans instead of k-cups.
Can support this statement. Ours has a nicer version available today for $799 (Philips) and it’s freaking amazing.
I would imagine the broiler would probably be just as much a target as a keurig machine. Same with drip. Anything where it’s an appliance that just sits in its grime on the counter while producing humidity.
Can also support this the only thing better than a super automatic coffee machine is a better super automatic coffee machine or an aeropress
OMG......
I once had found a nest of ants inside a laptop.
The laptop was on a table in the middle of a 40'x40' room but one day I came in, turned it on and for the next 15 minutes ant pieces flew out of the fan exhaust.
Your life may be morphing into a Blumhouse movie
Corrugated cardboard (boxes) can be a vector for cockroach eggs. I once crewed on a yacht whose captain forbid any cardboard boxes to be brought aboard for this reason.
Sprint sent me a magic box some years ago (It's like a cellphone repeater). UPS helpfully threw the box out in the snow where it was discovered a few days later. We installed it and bits of bug I'd never seen before started coming out. Turns out it was full of dead German cockroaches that presumably froze to death.
I live in a pretty rural area so the only ones I see sometimes in the summer that have hitched rides before are the virginia woods cockroaches that fly. But I've never seen them infest a house, they just seem to be attracted to the lights.
All it takes is one pregnant cockroach in a box somewhere. They will often hide in electronic devices.
Step on one, eggs stick to the shoe and voila.
I lived in an apartment with ~300 units and they sprayed in the units at least once a year. Not sure what they were spraying (they said it was pet safe).
But if you’re the exterminator, why would your boss being a cheapskate have to do with it? Wouldn’t they be the one being paid?
Yes, we’re being paid but also underbid to get the contract, and using more chemical than strictly necessary will cut into the profit for the job. So we mixed the chemicals the same, but wouldn’t spray growth regulator in every apartment (more expensive) and we wouldn’t put roach bait down in every unit only ones with roach issues and ones surrounding that one.
You want to keep the bugs down but not totally eliminate them, otherwise why would they need you? My boss never said that explicitly but we’d just use the minimum chemical mixtures in our tanks unless we were treating some specific infestation.
It wasn’t a scam exactly but it was definitely a “the squeaky wheel gets the grease” sort of thing. One person would pay $80 and get an outdoor treatment only. Another person would get a 2 hour intense complex spraying and attic dusting, extremely thorough, with follow up visits for the exact same price. Like any sort of service job, really.
That sounds like a very shady business…
I think he meant the landlord was being a cheapskate here
My own memory of New York is that if noticed an absence of roaches in your apartment, that meant you had mice, and the mice were eating the roaches. I told a friend that (she had happily commented about not having roaches) and she looked rather alarmed. I should have kept quiet.
There is a secret third option, which is to have a cat in the apartment :3
And when the cats get out of control introduce a bear? Or is it an alligator? ;)
You huff glue, eat cat food, and chug some beer.
Think Tank afficionado and Always Sunny fan? Quite the man of culture.
IASIP was a fairly popular show among my cohort of staffers.
Reassuring to know IASIP is upstream of US policy. We’re going to make it.
But comptrollers get paid shit.
You need to eventually make this ecology circular.
Just ate our apartment cat—-thanks for that advice.
Wait now I need a new one
I will have to ask the old lady who swallowed the fly.
I don't think NY has a native bear population (well, it does, but it's the wrong kind of bear), but you could get the alligator from the sewer.
No, just butcher all but one of the female cats to make *cat meat roasts*, and stick the spare in a cage. (Keep the males for vermin control.) See also [0].
0: http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Catsplosion
Alligator. When winter comes they freeze to death.
Because it’s new york, sometimes the cats lose to the rats. https://youtube.com/shorts/g-PXxTkPQ3c?si=02VGLetMiroJz_FP
You have absolutely no idea what a cat actually fighting or trying to kill something looks like.
That cat isn't losing, it's playing. It's toying with the rat and the "loss" was it repositioning to stalk it (the pressed to the ground body pose.)
Cats will fuck up all manner of wildlife an order of magnitude or two their weight.
Our cats have discovered that dead mice aren't any fun to play with, so they'll go to great lengths not to kill them. They'll pounce and stun them for a bit, then the mouse recovers and tries to scurry off - and the cycle repeats. Eventually the mouse finds a safe haven where a cat can't get to it.
A friend's parents used to have a maine-coon-esque cat who once brought home a lamb it had discovered in a nearby field. Would have had to get this thing over at least two fences but somehow managed.
Rats ≠ mice. Rats are a public nuisance that hang around because there’s always trash outside. Mice are the ones that invade your apartment.
I’m sure rats do invade some apartments, but that’s gotta be crazy rare.
Its... wildly accurate.
Neighbors decided they were tired of tenants and roach problems so they removed the kitchen from their rented apartment.
Roach problem went away for them and me.
I will randomly get a few waterbugs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oriental_cockroach) which are alarming but it's usually when temps are dramatically changing.
These are one of the favorite hunting conquests for my two cats. They are fast and change directions quickly and can fly. They are tough to catch to throw back outside, but not as fun as a cicada that is flying around and your cat(s) are jumping off of the furniture trying to catch them again. There are times where the cat and I are trying to catch the waterbug before it gets somewhere hard to get, but for very different reasons.
I lived in a large building that developed a roach problem. They were able to identify the original culprit. It turned out that when they mapped the complaints about roaches in units, it was radiating outwards over time from a single unit.
Not that that made life any easier once the buggers took over the building, but hey
It is also unfortunately rather common that the person living in the source apartment never complains about having roach problems, never admits to having a roach problem, and certainly don't want to let people in to check or fix it. Which leaves everyone else angry and in a perpetual loop of infestations.
Yep. Prolonged vacancy is bad too. Usually pest problems are highest when moving in, and then keeping a place clean and occupied is the best way to maintain pest-free apartment.
Every month or so, my apartment building sends someone to knock on every door of the (admittedly small) building to offer to spray a few places (like behind the stove) to keep out pests. I hadn't thought of it from this perspective before, but it makes sense from the perspective of trying to solve the problem you mention; the only way to keep them out is to handle it uniformly across all the units, and having someone come around to offer it every so often makes sure that new people moving in get it treated and no one will forget due to having to remember on their own.
this is why bombing a house doesn't work, the roaches flee to the neighbors, they then bomb and they flee back to your house (or migrate back over time).
I absolutely refuse to live in houses with roaches, too many horror stories. I once moved out of a house and left everything I owned in it due to the roaches.
It's the activity of the move that disturbs them. Same thing with mice/rats. Happens when nearby buildings are under construction, as well.
I lived in an apartment that had the kitchen redone. Once that happened no more roaches.
Now whenever I move into a new apartment I use space filler foam and silicon to seal around all the possible entrencences bugs could use to enter my apartment internally. So far so good.
I guess growth regulators must be pretty well tested because the concept is inherently quite scary, but it is still a bit scary to an uninformed person like myself, haha, so I’ll ask the dumb question. No side effects in humans, right? Your customers could still have kids?
It’s a good question. I treated my own apartment building for roaches many years ago, five years later had a completely healthy kid, she’s 8 now. For the sake of full disclosure, my second kid has a pretty major birth defect (spina bifida) but this was after the first healthy kid and before we developed a roach problem at our current house (one of the home care nurses actually brought them in) and treated for that, and many many years after I’d stopped being an exterminator, so the timelines of exposure -> birth defect don’t really line up.
The spray isn’t an aerosol, you apply it under corners and in places kids shouldn’t be able to reach. I’m not a chemist, but I know you’d have a real bad time if you drank it straight.
Hm your anecdata is pretty concerning..
Anecdata is not a thing.
I think this kind of data must be collected systemically, and if it isn’t, it is a failure to ask lawmakers about, not ex-pest-control professionals.
Anecdata is recognized by the Oxford English Dictionary [1] and has been around since the 1940s.
That being said, the usage here probably doesn't mean what the downvoted commenter was implying.
[1] https://www.oed.com/dictionary/anecdata_n
I don’t disagree with you, but I wasn’t going to exclude it from the discussion. I’m not trying to convince people to use IGRs or other potentially dangerous chemicals. We all have our risk tolerances and while I don’t think it’s related, it’s also worth stating.
If I thought there was a correlation, I’d for sure sue. But the birth defect my daughter has is often caused by a lack of vitamin B at a vital part of the gestation process. I hadn’t been an exterminator or sprayed my house for bugs for that matter for over a decade when she was born, and my wife and I had a perfectly healthy kid three years before. The roach treatment in my house occurred years after my daughter with a birth defect was born. The correlation is extremely weak at best.
Furthermore, while I’m not saying it’s impossible, but in my mind it feels very unlikely, especially as my wife was never exposed to any of those chemicals. Also, it’s not a genetic defect, which would come from the father, but more a mechanical one in gestation (failure to fully develop and build the spinal cord).
I always worry about the poisons for creatures that want our food because, well, they seem likely to track it into the place we keep our food! But I guess the plan is mostly not to eat food from containers that the roaches have gotten into in the first place.
From what I've found online about IGRs they mimic hormones that control parts of the insect's life cycle. They might, say, cause something to happen earlier or later than it naturally should have occurred. There are many things in an insect's life cycle that have to occur at the right time for the insect to reach adulthood and reproduce. Screwing up the timing doesn't kill the young insect, but if it makes it so it will never reproduce. Keep doing that to the insects in a place for a few generations and they die out.
Most of us probably do not want to do this, but cockroaches are in fact edible by humans. If IGRs mimic cockroach hormones, then eating a small amount of cockroach IGRs should not be any worse than eating some cockroaches.
Hormones are incredibly potent. It is not safe to conclude that a “small amount” of residue would be safe, as that could still be orders of magnitude more than occurs naturally in a roach.
Indeed, chemicals are scary, we trashed our entire pantry. It’s just not worth the risk. When you spray the focus for roaches is generally on cracks and crevices though, places roaches like to hang out and places humans shouldn’t be very often. It took about three months after spraying the growth regulator to have them fully disappear from the house.
Not a dumb question at all after learning all of the shenanigans that corps have been doing in suppressing information about their product's safety through out history. Even your skincare products can have ingredients that are now thought to be endocrine disrupting and cause all sorts of issues.
It is a good habit to learn about any chemicals being used in your living spaces. Any company that says the ingredients in their product are "trade secrets" so they are unable to tell you what they are should be a company you avoid doing business.
Given that roaches were affected by the GHI it appears they were immune to other pesticides and were not simply evading bait/poison? It could be the issue with the pesticides sold to consumers being too weak (understandable, as some consumers will try to consume those despite any warning labels and the vast majority won't be using any PPE while applying).
I don’t think it’s an issue of pesticides being “too weak for consumers”. You can buy all the same stuff as an exterminator[0] (use PPE and follow the labeling, don’t break laws, etc), but when you spray you’ll notice a huge knockdown, hundreds will die, but it only takes a breeding pair to get right back to an infestation in a few months. Generally when doing roach infestation treatments you do a multi tiered approach, with max legal mixes of pesticide + growth inhibitors in your spray then putting down bait in spots that you DID NOT spray (or they won’t ingest the bait). They’re just resilient little buggers. Spiders are actually harder to treat, but most people don’t end up with spider infestations. And then bed bugs are in a class of their own in terms of awfulness and difficulty of elimination.
[0] https://www.domyown.com
Thanks for this link and your replies in this thread. As someone who had to feverishly dust boric acid around my kitchen last summer (because in Washington state, it seems many online stores like Amazon don't want to ship anything effective. Maybe regulations?), I'm looking forward to trying out Vendetta Plus or something similar if these German roaches return.
Incidentally I've actually found "natural" solutions like boric acid and diatomaceous earth to be wildly effective (in killing/reducing established populations, not preventing new ones), if a bit unsightly and inconvenient to have lying around in piles to actually force the critters into crawling into them.
I probably ought still spend a day off sealing everything I can, though. Probably more pragmatic and less technically barbaric.
I would recommend getting an actual duster (aka "hand bellows"), especially one that has an actual spring to return the bellows instead of just a "plastic spring". I learned it from this video [0].
It really helped to basically make the dust small enough for the roaches to scurry through (instead of avoid like a pile). They don't really want to eat it (like bait), so they need to accidentally walk through it and then clean themselves (and incidentally ingest it).
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubfUacj7zQQ
In Germany you certainly can't. They would outlaw handsoap if they could get away with it.
Which roach bait products have you had success with?
I do buy industrial strength pesticides on Amazon but apparently if you were to buy off a reputable supplier you'd need to give your exterminator credentials. I spray Bayer's Polyzone outside and use Tempo between walls/floor and cabinets and see a dead roach inside every quarter or so (there are commercial food establishments nearby so roaches are just roaming the streets). Never bothered with GHI as the pesticides already do a great job.
So much of the problem of extermination is due to SEO and misinformation, agree or disagree?
If a poorly educated, stressed mom working two jobs googles "cockroaches in kitchen", what percentage of online information she finds is naive, misguided, maliciously lies, etc?
Isn’t that problem with everything now and Google search? I can’t find information that I can confidently trust to be genuine. Just SEO spam.
Recently I was looking for information on better food and treats for diabetic dogs and was inundated with so much bs I gave up.
Because of this I use Kagi's FastGPT to get infos like this: https://kagi.com/fastgpt
Agreed. And, maybe more subversive, it's like there's some effort to discourage the solutions that actually work (e.g., poisons and growth regulators) in favor of "natural solutions" that don't do any good. For instance, here's the top of the Google page I get for "cockroaches in kitchen."
https://img.bigchief.wtf/i/cf993b56-5831-4d4a-974f-4860158db...
boric acid is extremely effective. I use only boric acid, and i live in a forest. I put the powder under the stove, around the edges of cabinets, under the fridge, etc. After a new dusting (every 3-4 months or more) the carcasses will show up, maybe a half dozen.
And if you want a spray to kill insects you can see and watch, IPA (rubbing alcohol) and mint extract works fine. Except against centipedes.
For ants boric acid works sometimes, but so does talc or diatomaceous earth. However this stops them from tracking while you clean up whatever they're after. In my experience dealing with sugar ants, pissants, RIFA (fire ants from south america), fire ants (red ants in CA), and so on; the only 100% effective way to get rid of them is to put popcorn kernels in a blender and chop it till everything is smaller than 1/16" or so, and leave that somewhere moisture can't get to it. Ants eat it and bring it back to the nest to eat and then explode. I can't verify they actually explode, but that's the mechanism of action.
AFAIK boric acid and DE aren't harmful to humans, and corn and rubbing alcohol are usually fairly safe.
I mean from a cursory glance, yeah Googling it doesn’t look great. Baking soda, diatomaceous earth, boric acid, and bay leaves come up as the top results. I didn’t even consider any of those having worked for a few years in my early 20s as an exterminator. Right when I quit we were starting to use the “green options” like eucalyptus oil spray if people requested but they barely did anything. They were mostly for paranoid people with too much money who didn’t really have bugs in the first place. We weren’t spraying apartment buildings (which often had the most problems) with that stuff.
More broadly to your point, I am certain recipes and diet advice at least are totally captured by SEO with bad advice. My cooking has improved so much now that I stopped Googling recipes and mostly consult Kenji’s Food Lab book. For fat loss, I’ve lost 80 pounds mostly eating tons of fat and completely cutting out sugars/grains. The Internet is in a sad state where a Google search that can make someone money will often steer you wrong.
Any suggestions for mosquitoes? It feels like the roach problem is a solved problem. But mosquitoes not so much.
Mosquitoes I’d normally focus on doing a full yard treatment of a granular, we’d use bifenthrin back in my day, no idea what they’re using now (but bifenthrin is still on sale), you can use a spreader from Home Depot and it just takes a light dusting.
But as a sibling comment said, making sure your gutters don’t have standing water, or that there are little ponds without fish, is going to be your best bet. A big problem is going to be stuff near you, as their range can be 1-3 miles.
So, live in a well developed area with lots of people around taking care to avoid mosquitoes? You’re right it’s a hard one.
Deet. You just need to keep em off you.
Also fine fly screens reduce it to an outside problem.
it's not going to eradicate them, but if you just want your patio clear for an evening thermocell (and the knock-off refills from aliexpress) work great.
removing standing water on your property is a good start, but mosquitoes are a lot more mobile than roaches, so you'll need to do a lot bigger area than a normal residential lot for it to be very effective.
I know many tropical countries have successful stories fighting mosquitos by simply removing every single place that might contain water: ponds, flower pots etc.
Totally agree about using bait with reproduction control for roaches. I tried almost every roach control thing from Walmart and Home Depot and called multiple exterminators, but then I found Vendetta Plus Gel Bait. It's a birth control-based Gel bait that kills all German roaches hiding in the house. Wish the big stores would sell only that instead of all this other useless crap.
Interesting, wasn’t previously aware of Vendetta. I feel like all conversations about eradicating roaches need to distinguish between 1) getting rid of german cockroaches and 2) getting rid of any other cockroach. I’ve had less success with the former, especially within a row home in Baltimore built in the 1910s. You need to get in the walls and under floorboards to eradicate the issue with the germans.
do they make one for Argentine/Porteño roaches?
Yeah I’ve combined two products, Gentrol and Invict Gold. The combination nukes large populations.
Finding their ritual pathways helps in deciding where to sprinkle stuff that's bad for their health and that they'll bring home with them. One such thing is borax/boric acid. Ants, as well.
Also, cats. I now have two cats and now I average 1-2 American roach sightings a year.
I've seen a chicken eat a roach when I threw it outside a home. So I guess on the countryside, chickens can also be an option.
What is a difference between growth regulator and insecticide?
Getting rid of an infestation of roaches in a detached home is much easier than out of an apartment. It is pretty much impossible! But you can seal up holes.
We have a similar problem with box-elder bugs. About 3 years ago there was a massive explosion of them statewide and now we have thousands coming into the house every fall and staying until summer. They don't seem to live very long, but reproduce rapidly and since we have a lot of box-elder maples on the property, among many other trees, there's a constant supply of them.
They're harmless, but ugly and annoying as hell and so far impossible to get rid of.