Asymmetrical Information

20 Mule Team Borax sprinkled around the baseboards, while somewhat unsightly, is extraordinarily effective against just about anything with an exoskeleton. I believe the principle is to make sure they walk in it while retreating to their homes.

I can add anecdotal experience from my NYC apartment. The #$@!& sonic things don't appear to make any difference at all.

FWIW, I recommend a two-phase strategy: (1) abundant glue traps or snap traps depending on your preference. This will help you establish the likely ingress routes of the #$@^ers, followed by

(2) that expanding insulating spray foam liberally applied to holes around pipes, baseboards, etc., using steel wool and/or copper mesh (can get it at the hardware store) to close the holes they're using.

The professional exterminators are also generally not useful, except for in the beginning when you don't yet know what mouse droppings look like and/or don't know what kind of holes they use.

My experience is that now I'm better at it than the "pros" they send in. After two years of this, with mice being caught at one point on a near-daily basis, we've gone down to two in about ten months.

Hope this helps.

Highlight from the article:

Insects detect sound by special hairs or sensilla located on the antennae (mosquitoes) or genitalia (cockroaches), or by more complicated tympanal organs (grasshoppers, locusts, moths and butterflies).

More than I wanted to know about cockroaches, really...

sonic pest deterrence is just as effective as most electrical products that promise to make you slimmer, or creams that will eliminate cellulite...

see jane's old posts on how to deal with roaches

most effective: move to a city where its too cold for them to breed effectively..

one of the few benefits of canada is that pests have a very hard time surviving. hell the province of alberta has no rats... its too cold to survive outside and they have an integrated program to kill all rats that enter...

also, you can be fined severely (and i think have property condemned and destroyed) for not eliminating pests.. no letting the fuzzy wuzzies live

That NYT article left me with a strong smell of a Clorox sponsorship...

I agree with Devilbunny, my place downtown had them when I moved in and I WAY overbombed the place to kill them all. Then I lined the whole place with Borax. I saw them a few months afterwards, but I haven't seen one in years and I live next door to a restaurant.

Well, I used to live in Houston, where the roaches will carry you away in your sleep if you aren't careful. Unfortunately, you could be very careful yourself (no food out, ever, sprays, traps, etc), but others in your apartment building could be less careful and their problem could spill over to you.

I had a pantry that backed up to someone else's pantry and it was always having roaches in it. Everytime you opened the door, some scurry about. I made the terrible mistake of setting off a bomb in there without additional prep: the roaches came piling out and ran all over my apartment (the damned poison just annoyed them instead of killing them). I was killing them for weeks.

So I prepared the next time. I took a bunch of newspaper, rolled it up and taped it to make a "roach bat". I put on long sleeves, pointy-toed boots, tucked my pants outside my boots and wore a hat. I put the bomb off inside the pantry (after removing anything not sealed) and waited outside.

They came piling out by the dozens and I jumped around in a frenzy whomping them with my bat (which could reach the ceiling), stomping them with the boots and generally being a roach terminator. I must have killed at least fifty or seventy five roaches. The clean up was icky, but once done, I no problem for at least six weeks after that.

Then, it was time to make up a new roach bat.

Poison just annoys them and they can develop genetic resistance: back up your chemical strategy with other forms of lethal force if you really want to be effective.

Maybe a ferret or some other small, fast, and mean pet...

I've been using Combat for several years in my house in Florida. When I first started, the roaches disappeared as if by magic. Initially I changed the units regularly to keep the population down. The cue to change was the appearance of hatchlings. I have not had to place new units for almost a year.

This is an older house, and it had leaky crank-type aluminum windows. These were changed out a few years ago and replaced by very tight aluminum windows. I am sure that the new windows have had a role in keeping insects out.

Ants have been a problem, but I have had some success, based on an an idea I got googling on the internet. I have used borax dissolved in honey, about a 5% solution. The idea is not to make the solution so toxic that the ants drop dead, but will carry it back to the colony. The theory is that they feed it to the queen, and after a while she says, "Not tonight, I have a headache," and quits laying eggs.

Before Combat, I bought a set of ultrasonic gadgets, tried them for a week, and got my money back. They were completely worthless.

The principle behind borax is not chemical warfare so much as physical. The borax crystals cut into the exoskeletons and cause them to leak. This permits air to enter and dehydrates the suckers. Carrying borax to the queen might kill her by roughing up her cuticle, but she's not going to die by ingesting it.

The trick atleast in NYC is to move to high floors and in to a area with few restaurants. I have noticed that the last precaution err kinda destroys quality of life and a prime benefit of NYC.

I used to live in midtown east, 2nd floor apartment, on a street with 6 (yes, count' em six) restaurants. The damn place used to swarm with them, especially the huge water bug kind, till I basically took all the precaution Jane talks about in her post and sealed up everything from the windows to any holes in the boards and rubber lined the doors. Which took care of it for the most part.

Now I live in the financial district and have'nt seen one in my building in over a year. Not a roach motel or borax in sight. Seen Bome on the street out side near the trash cans. Almost no restaurants on Wall Street ;)

Is the trick with moving to a high floor the height that the little pests can't reach or the fact that modern high rises have garbage chutes which encourages people to dispose often?

If the city has allowed garbage disposal units earlier then generally we would have been in better shape. Blame the vast stupid bureacracy and their idiotic restrictions for part of the roach problem.

I once bought a can of roach spray that claimed to leave a residue that would poison any roach that walked across it, lasting for weeks. It didn't seem to be making a dent in the population, so I did a little experiment. Sprayed an invisible stripe right down the middle of the kitchen floor, turned off the lights, and waited quietly until my eyss adjusted to the moonlight. The damned critters were walking up to the stripe, sniffing it, and walking around.

If you could cover all their holes and paths with this stuff, it would restrict their movement but not kill them. Borax in the same places works better.

I used to live in south florida. The key I found was to remove all trash every night, and to keep the kitchen spotlessly clean. Replace the bait stations on a regular schedule. If my neighbors were deficient in their hygeine, I would end up with dead bugs on the carpet from time to time. Also, don't live on the ground floor, no weather stripping I found was good enough to keep out the roaches (especially the 2 legged roaches).

My solution -> my hyperactive weimaraner.

He has been quite effective in keeping the buggies in check, and we live in Texas, where the critters rule.

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