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In battle against cockroaches, it pays to know your enemy

By ANNIE ADDINGTON McClatchy Newspapers

COLUMBUS, Ga. — Jennifer Davidson, a Muscogee County, Ga., extension agent, is quick to call cockroaches her “mortal enemy.”

Three years ago, when she turned on the bathtub for the first time in her newly purchased 1940s-era home, a few dozen smokybrown cockroaches came parading out of a hole just above the faucet. The house had stood vacant for a few years, and in the absence of human inhabitants the cockroaches had taken up residence.

The fact that she knew the creatures well — she’d written a paper on cockroaches during her studies at Auburn University — didn’t mean she loathed them less.

She and her husband spent the first couple of months as new homeowners battling the big black pests, which were thriving in a couple of rotting trees outside as well as in piles of debris and mulch and then making frequent trips indoors through unsealed cracks and crevices.

After cleaning up outside the house, caulking cracks and crevices and killing more than 1,000 smokybrowns (Davidson kept a death tally along the way) using everything from boric acid and diatomaceous earth to cockroach baits and gels, Davidson has turned her home into a cockroach-free zone.

She hasn’t spotted a cockroach — dead or alive — in her house in months.

But she warns other homeowners to be vigilant as the warm, humid season of increased cockroach activity settles in.

Because cockroaches love moist, dark places and will eat just about anything, it’s important to keep your house clean and clutter-free. And the minute you spot a cockroach in the house, she says, you can figure you have a problem.

“If you see one that means you have like a hundred — or at least 20,” Davidson said.

If you spot one of the notoriously dirty, disease-carrying pests, the first item of business is determining what species of cockroach you have on your hands.

Although they are bigger and winged, the smokybrown cockroaches are actually less of a problem than their smaller German cockroach counterparts, which live and reproduce indoors.

Arthur Appel, professor and chair of the Department of Entomology and Plant Pathology at Auburn University, said the smokybrown is a “peridomestic cockroach.”

“That means they live around the house and leak in occasionally. These are cockroaches that typically are found outside under large rocks, around trash cans, in out buildings and tree holes, in piles of firewood or lumber.”

Essential to controlling the smokybrown, he said, is eliminating the moist, dark areas they use as harborage outside. He advises elevating stacks of firewood off the ground or getting rid of them altogether, moderating your use of mulch and pulling it away from the house, sealing holes in trees, putting pet food away at night and setting out gels and bait stations near places where you see cockroaches taking refuge (but in places where the bait won’t be exposed to rain).

If you spot the smaller, lighter brown German cockroaches in your home, you need to prepare for a more sustained battle. These are the roaches that live with you day and night and have a much faster life cycle that allows them to multiply more quickly.

“The German cockroaches will contaminate food and contaminate everything in your kitchen by pooping on it, by chewing on it, by spitting on it,” Appel said. “They’re pretty disgusting creatures.”

Many people become allergic to cockroach feces and their shed skin — and many kinds of disease organisms have been isolated to German cockroaches, Appel said.

But whether you have a German cockroach infestation or some of the big smokybrowns wandering in and out of your home, Appel said it’s best to avoid relying on insecticidal sprays to control the populations.

While bait stations and gels lure roaches in and then kill them as they digest the poisoned “food,” sprays will kill off significant numbers of roaches but then repel others, which often make their way into other portions of the house, spreading the infestation and making it harder to control, Appel said.

Boric acid is an effective cockroach killer — but only if you apply it correctly, as a thin, nearly imperceptible dust. If you spoon it against the wall in mounds, it won’t do much good, Appel said.

Some home-improvement stores sell boric acid in plastic squeeze bottles with peaked tips that help you to puff the powder out with ease. Appel recommends puffing boric acid under and in the back of the stove, behind the refrigerator, and in any void you can get into under kitchen cabinets.

“It’s like a thin deposit of dust,” Appel said. “The cockroaches walk on it, they don’t detect it, they lick their feet and then it kills them.”

In addition, you can buy a couple of tubes of cockroach gel bait and apply it in very small bits around the home and in places that lure cockroaches outside. Both bait stations and gels should be placed against walls or in corners, because this is where cockroaches tend to run.

For long-term cockroach control, Davidson and Appel agree that it’s best to focus on keeping the area in and around the home clean; sealing cracks and gaps (whether they’re around windows, in the crawl space under your house or around the plumbing under a sink); and using bait stations, gels and boric acid to kill cockroaches already present.

“It might take a little longer than spraying, but it’s going to be a more effective, more sustainable control strategy,” Appel said. “And you’re going to use less insecticide, and the insecticide is going to be targeted toward the cockroach. You’re not going to be killing everything and its mother out there.”

Of course, you can call in professionals to help abate a roach problem if you’re short on time, patience or cockroach knowledge. But Appel recommends looking for a company that uses an integrated pest management approach that includes making recommendations about sealing up your home to exclude roaches; using gels, bait stations or boric acid; and limited or no use of insecticidal sprays.

Justin Knox, vice president of operations for Knox Pest Control, said advising homeowners about where they need to seal up their home is an integral piece of the company’s cockroach control strategy.

“One of the things that a homeowner can do to help prevent outdoor cockroaches, such as the smokybrown and American cockroach, is to reduce as much clutter as possible around the house,” he said. “The least amount of area that they have to harbor the better. And it’s very important to try to eliminate points of entry. Caulk around windows and doors and make sure door sweeps are substantial.”

Since outdoor cockroaches are attracted to light, Knox also recommends minimizing exterior lighting and using yellow “bug” lights instead of incandescent bulbs.

If you’re not yet living in a cockroach-free home, Davidson advises using extra sanitation in areas where you suspect cockroaches have been.

“When you think a cockroach has been in an area you want to clean it with hot, soapy water because when they walk they produce this oily substance and that actually is a pheromone that says, ‘Hey, come here. It’s great. We love it.’ ”

Follow up with some disinfectant spray (a teaspoon of chlorine bleach mixed fresh with 16 ounces of cool water is one homemade option).

As you are ridding your home of roaches and their residue and perhaps cursing their very existence, keep in mind that even a filthy cockroach has its redeeming value as an outdoor insect.

Just ask Auburn University’s Appel, who at any one time is raising more than a million cockroaches, on a diet of Purina Dog Chow in his lab. Appel said the world has its share of “really neat cockroaches,” including a species in Australia that grows bigger than a human fist, lives on decaying wood and is never a pest; a beautiful green Cuban cockroach found outdoors along the Gulf Coast; and Madagascar hissing cockroaches, which communicate with one another in their hissing dialect.

Even the large American cockroaches hanging out sewer-side across the country have their purpose.

“Think of it this way,” Appel said. “Somebody has got to be the garbage man of the world, and the cockroach is the garbage man; he cleans up any kind of organic debris. They eat poop, they eat mushrooms, they eat decaying bodies. They’ll eat anything, and they’ll recycle it, so they’re actually a good guy. It’s just that when we give them all of our food and all of our garbage they go nuts.”

DON’T LET THE ROACHES ENCROACH

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