Boxelders and asian beetles are pretty easy to take care of. They are pretty slow, I recommend a vacuum cleaner. It is very fun to just suck up a bunch of them with a hand vac.
Yes, you can get the ones that you find out of the house with a vac. I have one set aside just for that purpose.
However, according to the exterminators, nothing reliable will kill them, and the ones that you don’t find right away leave their carcasses all over the house.
Yeah, I am still finding them from last fall… :(
At least they aren’t really bothersome and ugly.
The pest control service that I get goes opens every electrical outlet and puts the poision in there so that it gets between the walls where the buggers live.
I recently had an invasion of Little Black Ants - often called sugar ants or Pharoh’s Ants, but they are really just LBA’s.
The formed military columns to invade my sink and my cat’s food (and some tasty cat hurl). I tried cleaning the areas really well, with bleach to eliminate pheromone trails and I kept the kitchen sink dry and food free.
That worked for about a day, they came back.
I did some internet investigating and came away with a recommendation for Terro. It is just Borax and sugarwater. The Ants eat it and take it back to feed the queen and the rest of the nest. Then they die.
Its been four days and the Little pieces of cardboard with the Terro on them are empty except for a few corpses.
So far so good.
I had been told not to spray raid on them or anything because that just splits the nest and they grow another queen toot suite and you have twice the problem.
YES YES YES YES. I had the exact same problem. Those god-damn ants were everywhere, no matter how much I would clean. One of my roommates would leave a dirty plate out and it would be swarmed within the hour. Seriously, I tried all kinds of baits, liquid traps, regular traps… nothing. Terro got the job done.
Terro is magical ant-killing sauce.
I put it out in little drops on the cardboard and giant ant-orgies formed all over them. And slowly the numbers were dropping off… and then… none.
Now, they weren’t going away altogether, but there were far less. They didn’t leave forever till our apt building hired an exterminator. Since then I haven’t seen a single ant. The most likely scenario is that the ants were living in an adjacent apartment or in the walls, so my killing didn’t get all of them.
They do have a slight stench when killed though… not as bad as stink bugs but it’s there.
Vacuum cleaner really is the only way, other than repainting your house on the afternoon sun side.
I fixed my sugar ant problem with super glue. i live in an old house that was chopped up into apartments. the floor of my apartment has cracks that lead to the basement. I just followed the line of ants back to the crack they came from and filled the crack with super glue. man those guys freak out from the super glue fumes. I usually hit the crack with an air duster to blow the ants out of the way first.
Sounds like you need to coordinate with your neighbors.
Fucking LBAs, they get into everything.
I found a similar treatment effective: saturate some water with sugar (somwhere around 1 part sugar to 3 parts water?), add borax, then soak some bread in it and leave that near where they come in. More effective than anything we paid money for, and cheaper too.
It does a decent job, but the LBAs come back. I’m now moving on to keeping the treatment going for longer, rather than just stopping when the LBAs taper off.
[Edit] Hmmm, maybe I should coordinate with my neighbors too…
[Edit 2] I’ve also read dumping boiling water into their nest works too, but I’ve never been able to to find the nests, as they’re apparently not actually on our property. :-(
This isn’t going to happen and is one of the biggest reasons I can’t wait to get out of this neighborhood.
That sucks.
Maybe you can stop up all the roach entry points into your place? Roaches are easier to shut out than ants, as they’re bigger and not as slick at sharing information. If you can shut them out, local extermination might work.
I had decent luck shutting out the roaches in college and bait trapping those already inside when I was in a house next door to a restaurant dumpster, although the invasion was fairly mild, and they may have come back after I moved out.
We’ve tried stopping everything up, but German roaches are little suckers than can fit through really small cracks.
You sir, are screwed. Time to move!
The Geckos might be worth a try, I’d be surprised if they got rid of the roaches, but they might make a dent. I spent a summer in Saipan some 25 years ago, living in a house right on the beach; we had both geckos and roaches, but I saw more geckos than roaches, so perhaps they had some effect?
At least you’d get the surreal show of watching the geckos slowly eat each other.
Oh, cool!
NOT WITH ROACHES! THE GROUPTHINK HAS BEEN DEFEATED!
I’m not being an asshole when I say this, but if it were me I’d move. The first place I ever rented when I was out on my own had an infestation, I left everything there and moved. I grew up with these things and I can’t tolerate them as an adult.
Unfortunately I doubt you would be willing to leave all your worldly possessions somewhere and just up and leave like I did (because it’s doubtful your stuff is the same quality as a typical first year bachelor using cinder blocks, plywood and duct tape as decor) – but the alternative is being stuck with them, forever. I’m not convinced they can ever be completely eradicated (but that probably has something to do with my illogical hatred of them).
Just know that if you bring your stuff with you when you abandon your home you’re just bringing them with you. They live everywhere, as you probably know, even in places like VCR’s and inside stereo’s
I feel bad for you man, and I can offer nothing substantial other than my sincere (though probably over-the-top) response, I would get the hell out and never look back.
I’d rather have a poisonous spider infestation.
German cockroaches eh? I think you’ll have to call in these guys, I hear they can clear them out:
I’ve tried it and all that it manages to do is to kill off any surface swarm. It doesn’t really penetrate into the colony well as the colony can be quite extensive. They come back.
Yes indeed - Japanese wisdom is generally to try and drown them. Then again, I only ever had to deal with one at a time, rather than an actual infestation. I always remember being happy if it was a large roach, as that apparently means it has gotten in from somewhere, rather than a baby, which could indicate a nest.
The hoi-hois (roach motel??) are great, but you need someone with a stronger stomach than me to empty them!