Asymmetrical Information

> If you live in New York, where there are conveniently located trashcans on every streetcorner, just grab your baggie on the way to work and deposit it in the nearest municipal garbage can.

I thought that it was illegal to deposit household trash in a public trashcan.

I have the occasional, recklessly daring "palmetto bug" venturing into my house in South Texas, but my cats (four, all carefully sheltered, indoors cats) have so much effecient fun, stalking, maiming, and torturing them, it is hardly neccessary to much else, other than the basic stuff--- taking out trash, keeping food in tightly-sealed containers, rinsing dishes, etc.

It may be, but that doesn't stop all my neighbours from doing it. So many things in New York are illegal that one can't reasonably expect anyone to follow all the laws.

On the other hand, I'm hell on policing up after your dogs.

Just wait until you get your first mouse. When I lived in the East Village, that was a bi-weekly event.

It is amazing I did not get the plague.

I suggest finding a DIY bug store and picking up a container of Demand CS. It's about $50 a bottle here in Florida (where palmetto bugs are large enough to carry off small children as well as miniature poodles). I have a pump sprayer that I can apply it around the baseboards, but for counter tops, I simply place a dime sized drop in a plastic cup, fill it with water, then use a sponge brush to dab around the edges.

You will be ant, cockroach, and silverfish free for at least 6 months.

Marble forgot to mention that palmetto bugs are FLYING cockroaches. You haven't lived until you've had one dive-bomb you! (Another Floridian.)

I love geckos though my favorite is the tokay. They sing. But if you think cats are bad for getting into things...

Yes, if the palmetto bug flies into your house, then the bug spray won't help.

I suggest a large mallet instead.

I live in the tropics, so cockroaches are everywhere (there's no winter to kill them off). I haven't had one in my apartment in months. Everything Megan says is true, but it can also help to seal up ingress points. If you have piping going into walls, stuff steel wool tightly into the gaps and cover with spackle. This will also keep mice at bay.

I don't need to buy geckos. They're indigenous here. And I have adored lizards since I was a kid.

"6) Put down boric acid in every crevice I have no idea why it works, but it's great roach prevention. Keep it away from any areas that pets or children might come across it an consume it."

I have the answer to this!! (so excited) Cockroaches breath through their "skin" When they are completely covered with Boric Acid (which they have had to walk through because you have put it everywhere their scurrying little legs will take them) it covers there skin and it does not come off in water. They suffocate to death.

I actually like seeing the occational mouse in my apartment. It is a sure sign the building doesn't have rats. And it give something for the Kitty to do.

I'll second the comment on cats. Our one experience with household cockroaches in the Northeast US (I've lived in FL and Panama, so I have to qualify that) made my one cat's day. A cockroach popped his head out of the drian of the sink, my wife saw it, grabbed the cat, and put the cat on the edge of the sink. The cat took one look, thought "brown and crucnhy" and proceeded to supplement his diet. Every morning thereafter, he would be found on the sink, waiting...

Please don't combine ideas 5-8 with #9- geckos and other lizards can die of pesticide poisoning. Ive been an amature herpetologist for years and seen too many pets die this way. On a lighter note, chameleons(the African type) are a gas to catch flies with, you can walk around with one on your finger and sort of 'point and click'- or maybe it's 'lick' in this case.

Yep, down here in Florida the roaches are so numerous that we just learn to live with them. If one flys into your face so what, just slap it off. We wake up with them on our pillows eyeing us impatiently -- they eat the wax out of our ears and the crust off our eyelashes as we sleep. I caught one and put him in a jar and fed him succulent pieces of garbage, he is huge now, I will enter him in a contest.

Also try natural diatomecious earth. It's safer than boric acid.

http://ighawaii.com/naturally/naturalanimal/de.html

>The problem with apartments is that no matter how clean you are, somewhere in your building there is some verminous lout

So you're renting at the UN?

>On the other hand, I'm hell on policing up after your dogs.

Amen, sister. Giant breeds playing banker is hella grotesque. Got on myself, and I never go anywhere with him without two poo bags.

Denver is looking PRETTY NICE right about now ;)

I once got a $50 fine for throwing my household trash in a wastebasket on the corner. Not recommended.

We have had so little trouble with insect pests since moving from Chicago to Milwaukee that the first thing I thought when I saw a rite of passage in New York: first roach was that you had smoked a joint down to the stub end.

One other point is to not leave any water lying around. Ie, mop up any spills, and don't leave pans "to soak" overnight in the sink. No food and no water will discourage most cockroaches from moving in.

I very occasionally see scout cockroaches from other apartments in my building; I just have to be careful of leaving food and water out for a week or two, and can avoid any invasion. (I don't need to go to heroic measures like emptying the trash daily.) One advantage to living in a lower density area than NYC.

One downside: cicadas. I heard a few tuning up this morning.

Triticale,

If you are living on the fashionable East Side, you need to watch out for millipedes and possibly silverfish. I lived on Prospect Ave for 5 years, and the millipedes gave me the shivers.

Close all drains and open them only when you are running water. I live in DC and no matter how clean my place is, I can't control what my neighbors are doing, so it was only after catching one coming up through my sink did I discover that it was the roaches' primary entryway.

My building is exterminated every month, and still They Live On. They're probably immune by now.

"Denver is looking PRETTY NICE right about now ;)"

Oh sure, no cockroaches! All we have are mosquitoes... and West Nile virus! Nature is a Mother!

Also effective are the plug-in things you can buy at Home Depot. They just stay on all the time and don't seem to bother our cat. We had waterbugs in the West Village -- hours of amusement for the cat. I'd actually see the giant antannae sticking out from under the wall lightswitch cover. But when we arrived in Brooklyn we only had tiny cockroaches, far too small to a cat used to hunting big game.

I once woke up with a palmetto in bed with me. I heard the crackling of its shells or wings or whatever, and thought it was static from the radio. I reached over and turned the radio off, but the crackling continued. Then I saw him, in extreme closeup mind you, trundling across my pillowcase. I flicked him off and chased him into the bathroom, where he was explosively dispatched by one of my stylish cap-toed Oxfords.

I love telling that story!

Suggesting a cat to a known dog lover may be stretching her good graces a bit...but I can also testify that cats are a highly efficient organic insecticide. My folks' basement used to get 2-3 very noisy crickets per week, all summer long. Fourteen years ago, they brought home a kitten; end of cricket problem, and a notable reduction of the spider problem. Moths and flies are also fair game, if they wander within striking range. Sure, unlike conventional pest control methods you gotta clean a litterbox once a week or so, but when's the last time you ever heard a can of bugspray purr?

As for flour bugs (grain weevils), although a bag can become infested by free-roamers, their eggs actually come in the flour -- there's no practical way to isolate them, and do note that an old bag of pasta may hatch just as readily as an old bag of flour (or any product based on raw flour, such as Bisquick mix). Supposedly the eggs can be killed by placing the flour product in a freezer for a couple days.

At any rate, storing ALL flour-based items in tupperware containers is a great idea even in very clean dwellings, because in the event a product self-infests, the weevils may crave variety and bore out of the sack to see what the buffet line looks like.

Is this more of an apartment problem than anything else? I live in Florida, have no bug problem and am not exactly the tidiest guy around, but it's a house.

What's the size requirement for "a really huge disgusting cockroach"? I saw one that was 3 or 4 inches long once, scurrying across the floor of a spotlessly clean electronics factory in Malaysia.

If you actually saw one close to 4 inches, I'd say it qualifies. Very few cockroach species get anywhere near that large. Though they always seem to look bigger than they are...

You realize, of course, that by killing those roaches you're just escalating the cycle of vileness. Sorry.

Waterbugs. Yeah, those things freak me out. Just the thought of them crawling around in the dark gives me revulsive shudder syndrome.

Don't leave your clothes on the floor either. And Missy is right: keeping your drains (bath, shower, sinks) closed when you're not using them is both necessary and easy.

Ross N., in most places in Florida "I've never had a bug problem" really means "I havne't seen any of the thousands of cockroaches that I share my home with."

Some years ago, a (south) Florida paper sent out a roach inspector to houses whose owners claimed they'd never seen a roach inside. On average there were several (over ten, but I forget exact numbers) thousand cockroaches there). The great majority can happily live without crossing your path. IIRC a lot of them just sleep out of site during the day and spend the night outside (where tasty cockroach food is never far away).
Many years of pesticides (the state is virtually drenched in bug killers of various kinds) may have beaten them back, but I'm skeptical.

My most unpleasant NYC cockroach experience was finding one scuttling up the inside of my garment bag as I was packing for job interview. :-(

One of the things I most looked forward to in moving to a house in suburbia was to escape from the waterbugs. At least once a month or so while we lived in NYC, my wife (who had a real job while I was still post-doc'ing) pulled me out of bed early to remove a waterbug that had gotten trapped in our bathtub. (They presumably got there though the ventilation grate on the wall over the tub.) I got to be good at scooping them up in a paper bag and dumping them out the window into the alley; they're too big to squish. Though they stopped freaking me out after a while, I never accepted having them around. Meticulous removal of any possible roach food from the kitchen is definitely the strategy I consider most effective for encouraging them to haunt someone else's apartment.

To ALL GECKO LOVERS, please help !!!!

I have a different spin on this discussion. I have lived with roaches and hate them, but I am absolutely terrified of the little pod of geckos I have discovered that spend time outside my door each evening. It's too the point where I won't go outside.

I have tried turning on a light far from my house in the hopes they will pursue insects there, but there's a crack in my wall which they must be living in.

I have discovered that most people like them and living in Arizona, I have to find a way to deal with them. The gummy boards are out, as I don't want to hurt/kill them, but I just want them to go away!! They don't sell gecko repellants here.

I have had the huge disgusting American roaches indigenous to the state in my house, and although I freak out (and I do have pest control), a half can of Raid and my cat seem to take care of them.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. I am thinking of sealing the crack. Will this help?

Geckophobe here. Thanks.

Cats vary in their interest or effectiveness. We had a female cat once in RI who loved to kill mice and chipmunks (aww!). She patrolled stone walls all day long and proudly brought her conquests home to lay at our feet. OTH we have a cat now, a male, who used to catch mice, outside, never inside, let them go, chase them, catch them, throw them in the air, chase them, etc., until one of us would save the poor creature and take to the woods. One night a mouse entered the house and ran in circles around the cat while he watched dumb-founded. I finally caught the mouse myself and flushed it down the toilet.

I lived in Hoboken, NJ, just across the river from Manhattan. We lived in a 3-family brownstone owned by an Italian immigrant family on the ground floor, and almost never had a roach problem, although we were plagued by hordes of mosquitoes (the NJ state bird) who robbed us of many a night's sleep. Our most serious roach problem ocurred when a fire house down the block called in an exterminator to clean out a roach infestation that probably resulted from the fire fighters' consumption of junk food while waiting for a call. The exterminator's efforts cleaned out the fire house by triggering a mass migration of roaches to the rest of the block, including our apartment. Only when the city closed the fire house and sold it were we free of roaches again.

Terminix.com has a "pest library" that describes various pests and how to control them, even without calling terminix. Closing up entrances seems to be key in all cases.

Those flying cockroach thingies don't seem to like coffee very much. For some reason back when I lived in Chicago they would crawl out of the pipes in my bathtub or toilet (!) which would catch me by surprise.

Hi Gecko phobe,

I don't know that there is any way to get rid of those geckos. I've learned to live and let live. They seem FAR more scared of humans and stay pretty much outside the house and on the walls, etc.

If you have cats they'll keep the gecko population down, but geckos are fast and they can slither into the tiniest crevasses around the eaves and under walls, etc.

As animals go the albino and banded geckos (which seem dominant around homes in this region) are pretty clean animals as most reptiles are. They don't really do any property damage or feed on your trash. They eat insects and and all those gross little tiny beetles that inhabit the wastes.

They want to stay as far away from you as possible and if you approach one it will scatter.

I can't think of too many ways too keep them away from your house. If they pop up inside your house (like the garage!) - don't freak out, as their just staying away from all that radiation and heat. If you find them in your garage, you may want to make sure your door seals are tight and your garage door is properly insulated around the frame (making contact with the floor and sides flushly)

Hope this has been some help. Geckos are just way too common out here to get them all.

This discussion makes me very glad that I live in Canada. My skin is crawling just thinking about this.

Thanks to SDAI - Tech1 for the response !!

I have been trying to make peace with them (the gecks), and even feel a little sorry for the creatures.

It helps to know they are more scared of me than I am of them. Funny, but some people are afraid of spiders and I have never been. I have been known to see one and just let it live in my house.

I think this is because I read Charlotte's Web as a child. So, I am telling myself that if they have a gecko on the Geico commercials, they can't be all bad. (not that I like those commercials or insurance companies at all)

Still, I will flip out the day I see one in my house, if it ever happens.

Thanks,
Gecko-phobe

I used to live in Arizona, where cockroaches actually live outdoors, so there's not such a big problem with getting infested with them unless you're really disgusting - they just roam in from time to time no matter how clean you are, especially if you live on the first floor. I also highly recommend keeping a can of Raid handy - highly effective, kills 'em in seconds when you douse them. This is particularly useful when, I don't know, you wake up in the middle of the night to the sound of insectile scratching that is loud enough to actually wake you up and you find that it's a gigantic roach hanging out in your bedroom - not that that has ever happened to me! For other desert dwellers, Raid is also effective on scorpions (though not indicated as such on the back of the can) - that's another fun thing to find in your apartment!

I grew up in South Carolina. The mere idea of Palmetto Bugs still gives me the heebie-jeebies (and fire ants were no picnic, either).

I live in Pennsylvania now and have two cats, so the only roaches I ever see are little ones, lying on their backs, squashed flat. One evening I saw a live one in the kitchen and screamed for my boyfriend to bring the cat. He came rushing into the kitchen holding my cat Pippin like someone rushing to a fire would be holding an extinguisher. It looked so goofy that I started laughing, and my boyfriend started laughing and dropped the cat, who just looked confused. The roach didn't enjoy the commotion and decided to leave on his own. Haven't seen him since.

It helps to know they are more scared of me than I am of them. Funny, but some people are afraid of spiders and I have never been. I have been known to see one and just let it live in my house.

If you ever wake up with a large, unseemly welt you didn't have in the morning, you might change your mind. Or if, like one of my sister's former roommates, you have moved into a place that suffers from near-infestation levels of large spiders and you wake up one morning with your mouth savoring the taste of a sirloin cut you never previously had before...

And if you don't know what a female black widow is, look it up (very distinctive shape) and then kill any you find indoors. NOT a good thing for you, a guest, or a housepet to be bitten by.

The anoles that live in FL are voracious roach consumers, too, and those lizards can be found everywhere. I occasionally catch one and toss it in the house; they vanish into the walls and are seen about as rarely as their prey.

However, the bugs are only a minor matter. I've had three-foot poisonous snakes come up through the toilet before. Joy.

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