Cockroaches are quite unpleasant animals because they not only feed on our supplies but also transmit and cause diseases and allergies. However, it is not always your fault if cockroaches settle in the house. Everpest repellers have all it takes to chase away cockroaches and their smell.
Why Do Cockroaches Come Into The House?
Cockroaches are found almost everywhere in the world. They love warm, humid climates, which means that the United States is too cold for them. But there are several species of cockroaches in the United States and the animals are looking for a warm place. Our houses (which are even heated in winter) are perfect for that. If they then also find enough food, their luck is perfect.
So roaches aren’t necessarily a sign that you leave the trash lying around or never do the dishes. It’s more that if you get a roach infestation, you’re just unlucky because they’ve found a crack through which they can get into the house (roaches aren’t likely to get through windows because most species can’t fly).
Where Do Cockroaches Come From?
Where do cockroaches actually come from? It has already been mentioned that they enter the house through cracks. However, it is also possible that you bring them in from vacation or in imported groceries.
What Do Cockroaches Smell Like?
Cockroaches produce pheromones, which they excrete in their faeces, for example. This is how the animals recognize that a conspecific is nearby. The more pheromones excreted in one place, the more cockroaches will gather there. The cockroaches excrete most of their droppings in their (usually well-hidden) sleeping places. But even where they eat, the smell can be felt if there are enough cockroaches.
The smell of cockroaches is slightly sweet, also musty. It’s one of the signs by which you can tell that you have roaches (when it’s not smelling because you haven’t washed the dishes in several days).
When it comes to pest control, the smell is an advantage for us, because it allows you to set up traps and prevent reproduction. However, the smell indicates that the colony is already quite large because just a handful of cockroaches don’t stink that much. This is rather bad news. In some cases, cleaning the apartment no longer helps, and the exterminator has to come.
We Can Smell Cockroaches
A single cockroach doesn’t produce enough odor to bother us, humans. However, he gets stronger the more cockroaches gather in one place. Most of the time, the nests where the insects sleep smells bad, but if there are enough droppings in the kitchen cupboard around the open packets of rice, it can smell bad there too.
What Does The Smell Tell Us?
Unfortunately, the sweet or musty smell of cockroaches is a bad sign. It means that the apartment is already quite badly infested. In such a case, it usually only helps to set up poison traps or to get the exterminator.
However, you should check beforehand whether you are dealing with cockroaches. Dirty dishes or organic waste that has fallen into a corner and been overlooked can also smell bad. Therefore, look in the kitchen cupboards to see if you can find chewed packaging or crumbs of feces. If you have a cat, a dead mouse can also be responsible for the stench. Ventilate the apartment properly – and also in the future, because that helps prevent cockroaches. If you find eggs, remove them.
Detect Cockroach Infestation
An infestation on a smaller scale is not immediately recognizable. Cockroaches are mainly active at night. You don’t see them straight away and it’s very difficult to see them, especially in the dark, due to their high speed. Seeing cockroaches during the day is a sign that the infestation is already very severe.
Preferences Of All Cockroaches
There are minor differences between the individual cockroach species, especially in color and size. Cockroaches grow significantly larger than the other two species, they can grow up to 3 cm long. The German cockroach and the wood cockroach each only grow to half the size.
All cockroach species have certain preferences. Such conditions can make an infestation more likely. Usually, these are:
- warm rooms
- Rooms with high to very high humidity
- Rooms with exposed food or a large number of food leftovers (crumbs, badly washed plates, etc.)
If these conditions come together, a paradise for cockroaches is created, in which they nest very quickly. Cleanliness is therefore already the top priority in order to prevent a cockroach infestation.
Can You Prevent Cockroaches?
You can’t really prevent cockroaches because they get into the house in different ways. But it’s not bad if your air and clean the apartment regularly and generally don’t have any open food packaging in the cupboard.
You should also check your house for cracks and openings in the outside area, i.e. cut off the way for the cockroaches to get inside. Incidentally, this is not only useful against cockroaches, because gaps and holes in the facade allow rain and other insects to damage the house wall.
Fight Cockroaches
At first, you don’t even notice the infestation, because a few individual cockroaches do not cause much damage. It gets worse when you discover the tracks of the pests: droppings, gnawed food packaging, one or the other scurrying cockroach when you turn on the light in the kitchen at night.
But it shouldn’t get that far in the first place, because then you have to fight the cockroaches seriously and maybe even with pesticides.
Control of Cockroaches
How to get rid of small cockroaches? There are a large number of different means for combating cockroaches, but they have different effects. The best known are
- cockroach traps
- cockroach angel
- Bait boxes for cockroaches
In addition, many other means are used by professional cockroach fighters, some of which are significantly more effective. These include hormonal agents that make the cockroaches unable to reproduce or certain gases that are very effective but not harmless to use.
In recent years, fighting with gas has been used less and less, since the health risk is considered to be hardly justifiable. The gels against cockroaches, which are also available for private individuals, are harmless.
The bait cans are generally the most effective, as they contain a very potent poison that kills cockroaches in very small amounts.
