I Have Roaches – Now What?

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PestBear’s Blog

As a homeowner, there are few worse feelings than finding a roach in your home. You might be headed to the kitchen for a late-night snack or glass of water, and as you round the corner into the kitchen, you see it: a brown, ovoid cockroach scurrying away from the light. Before it can escape, you smash the crap out of it with your shoe. As it writhes in its final death throes, you see another pestilent invader crawling into your kitchen cabinets by the oven. It has begun.

While this is a bit more dramatic than most people’s cockroach discoveries, finding one cockroach usually means there are more. You’ve got a problem with cockroaches, plural, and just how plural remains to be seen. Before you call an exterminator, give these first steps a try to see if you can stop an infestation before it escalates.

Prep the Exterior of Your Home

Your home is being invaded from the outside. Cockroaches love cracks in brickwork and walls because they can easily fit through and get to one of their three most favorite things in the world: heat, moisture, and food. Using some proper silicone caulking or sealing foam will put a stop to their relentless march to your kitchen or hot water heater. Additionally, you can treat these areas with roach-specific pesticides that will discourage further exploration.

Bait Traps and Sprays

Go to your local big box or hardware store and get some roach traps. These are what professionals use to kill the nest at its source by poisoning roaches that make their way to the trap and ensuring that they carry the poison back to the nest to kill off the rest of them. Many traps also sterilize any egg sacs a roach may be carrying so that the eggs don’t hatch after it dies (one of the primary ways an infestation gets dug in).

You can also spray or apply long-term roach pesticide along your baseboards and behind your fridge and stove. These treatments can last up to six months and kill roaches that make it in the house. Every 6 months you’ll need to spray again. Most treatments are non-toxic to humans and pets but lethal to roaches and their offspring.

Are you a Tampa/Oldsmar local homeowner trying to get rid of a roach problem? Roaches don’t have to be a fact of life in South Florida. PestBear can help. Contact PestBear today to set up a consultation. Don’t keep fighting the war on roaches alone, get professional help from PestBear and get rid of them for good.

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