Cockroach Removal Information

The prospect of cockroaches appearing in your home is enough to send anyone over the edge. They are dirty little pests, with a particularly unpleasant appearance which terrifies many people.

If you have turned on the lights in the middle of the night, only to catch site of these ugly little critters scurrying over your floor, you will no doubt be looking to exterminate sooner rather than later. Unfortunately Cockroaches are known for being pretty resilient and unaffected by many of the traditional extermination methods, which makes getting, rid of them an even harder mission.

The cockroach is a dark brown insect, about one inch long with spiky hind legs and large antennas, a broad back and a relatively small head. They are extremely primitive creatures with mouthparts on the underside of the head. The Cockroach does have wings, but doesn’t actually fly very far; it has two parallel streaks running from the head to the base of its wings. The most common cockroach to be found in homes, restaurants, hotels and food establishments is the German cockroach.

Cockroaches live in warm, dark areas and tend to be nocturnal by nature. Residential properties are a particularly attractive home prospect for cockroaches because they like to escape from the ravages of weather elements. Unfortunately they like to find warm, dark places to hide such as shoes or the humidity of the bathroom. One of the reasons Cockroaches are such filthy creatures are that they very often live in sewer pipes and emerges from these to enter the home. They are full of germs and are known to carry dysentery, gastro-enteritis typhoid and food poisoning organisms. Cockroaches eat anything and happily feed on scraps in your kitchen, or in your bins, with the result that they easily contaminate food and spread diseases from their body or from the droppings they leave all over your property.

Throughout the world there are over 4,000 species of cockroach, 30 of these are associated with human habitations and four are particularly well known as pests in residential properties. These four include the American Cockroach, the German cockroach, the Asian Cockroach and the Oriental Cockroach.

Cockroaches develop from eggs to adults over the course of a three month period and they live from six months to approximately one year in total. Female cockroaches lay eggs up to eight times, producing three to four hundred baby cockroaches. When a large infestation is present, you may get an unpleasant scent, not unlike almonds.

Therefore, you can quickly get the idea of how rapidly these beasts multiply if one cockroach can produce another 400 in such a short space of time! Apart from the fact they are hardened to changes in the environment, they are also able to survive without food for as long as three months and water for a month. They are quite immune to the effects of ordinary insecticides but nowadays there are many cockroach specific brands on the market, available from DIY hardware stores and on the Internet or even some supermarkets and pet stores.

As a short term solution to getting rid of cockroaches people often make their own traps using jars or containers with an inch of water, which cockroaches can fall into and drown. Boric acid powder is commonly used around points of entry where cockroaches might attempt to get into the building. This powder sticks to the underside and legs of the cockroaches and when they ingest it they will die. The bonus about the powder is that they bring it back to their nests and ultimately kill other members of their family.

If you have discovered a problem then you really shouldn’t get complacent about it and although you can use the aforementioned suggestions, it should only be to give you immediate reassurance that you are attempting to tackle the problem whilst you wait for the cockroach control exterminators to arrive. These short term solutions really won’t make much of a dent in a cockroach infestation purely because of the number of eggs each one is capable of producing and because their hiding places are usually difficult to gain access to or indeed find.

Longer term solutions for exterminating cockroaches on a permanent basis include the use of an electronic emitter which sends out a high frequency noise that they hate the sound of. Alternatively you could use a ‘pesticide bomb’ or ‘fogger’ but these emit a strong, chemical based pesticide so the room has to be fully sealed off and is not ideal for use in the home, unless carried out by professional cockroach control experts. Sticky traps are sometimes used to capture them but these are not for the faint hearted because not many people like the sight of cockroaches, whether alive or dead, so they are unlikely to want to deal with having to dispose of them from the sticky traps.

With Cockroaches being so resilient and environmentally adaptive, it is important to aggressively attack their presence in your home and Pest Control Exterminators are completely trained to do this efficiently and without fuss, sending these pests packing in no time.