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Seven Ways to Exterminate Cockroaches
by Marvin - All Posts By This Author
(1 votes)
Cockroaches are tough to kill. They have developed resistance to commercial insecticides, developing skills such as crawling on the walls of your houses and apartments. Continue using commercial insecticides and you’re just helping cockroaches toughen up their stock. As a human being, you need to be craftier than cockroaches and use an assortment of ways to exterminate them. The following is a list of roach extermination techniques using simple tools.
1. The Petroleum Jelly Trap: This method is more practical if you only come across a cockroach once or twice a week, and if you’re dealing with a small colony somewhere around your house. Create your own trap by applying petroleum jelly on the inner walls of a container with steep sides.
Next, make a paper ramp that leads into the container so the cockroach can climb into it. Place a bait inside the container, preferably something that has a strong sweet odor like sugar or apple cider. When the roach smells the sweet odor, it will quickly climb up the ramp and fall into the container. Since the petroleum jelly is sticky, the roach will get trapped. Finally, take the container and flush the roach down the toilet.
2. Boric Acid Poison: Cockroaches have ruined many otherwise peaceful and beautiful nights so it’s understandable that many people hate them real bad. Try punishing them with boric acid poison. Boric acid works by abrading the roach’s shell or cuticle with its harsh particles. With its shell damaged, the roach will soon die of dehydration. They may even die a slow, painful death if you live in a highly humid environment since it takes longer for the roach to lose its moisture. Mix the boric acid with sugar, flour, and water to make it into a paste so it will be more tempting to roaches.
3. Let Loose Some House Geckos: Think of cockroaches as enemy soldiers trying to invade your home. House geckos are the best foot soldiers to counter their attack. These lizards thrive in warm, humid areas where they crawl around in search of insects to eat. No roach is too big for a house gecko. If it can’t swallow the whole thing, it will settle for its head, and that roach is dead for sure (or at least, dying, because roaches are known to survive for a while without heads). Get five or six of these and let them loose inside your house, and your nights will soon be peaceful because these guards are nocturnal. The only catch is, you might get a house gecko infestation next.
4. Burn them with a Heat Gun: If you see cockroaches everyday in different parts of your house, you need to go after their colonies. Roaches usually live underneath cabinets, cracks in the walls, and anywhere dark and moist. Get a heat gun, the one used for stripping paint, angle its nozzle toward suspected colonies, and blast away. If you hit the right spot, roaches will scramble or die out instantly since the extreme heat will dehydrate and suffocate them.
5. Use a Vacuum Cleaner: Smashing or stepping on cockroaches can be messy and gross. It’s better to use a cordless vacuum cleaner when you see one crawling on your countertop. Simply direct the nozzle on the creepy crawler and it will instantly suck it in. It won’t even have time to spread its wings and fly. You can also try putting boric acid inside the vacuum cleaner so that the roaches won’t be able to get out once they get in.
6. Chuck them out with Chinese Chalk: Chinese chalk is made of Diatomaceous Earth, a naturally occurring chalk-like sedimentary rock. It’s usually available in hardware stores and Chinatown. Chinese chalk acts like boric acid as it abrades the roach’s shell. Just draw lines across shelves, cabinets and walls using the chalk. When cockroaches cross these lines, the particles of the chalk will cut them like broken glass, and they’ll soon die of dehydration.
7. Destroy Colonies with Gas: Finally, huge problems call for drastic measures. Think of this as your weapon of mass destruction against cockroaches. First, you need to find the roaches’ colonies. If you’re not sure where they are staying, prowl your premises very late at night, like 1:00 or 2:00 AM. Roaches are nocturnal so you’ll be able to trace where they live if you see one wandering at night. Once you know the location of their colony, go to the gas station and fill up a can of gas. Pour the gas on their colony and watch them run for their lives. They’ll never get far though, because the gas will eventually poison them. Seeing roaches swarm is absolutely disgusting, so be prepared. You may be able to destroy an entire colony of roaches through this method.
Cockroaches can be persistent, so you need to regularly apply these techniques to get rid of them completely. Most importantly, don’t surrender to them. They may be one of the toughest creatures on earth, but you’re the smartest.
Easy solution, discovered accidentally after a party.
Leave a bucket of icecream, only half full, under some stairs. when the icecream melts, it creates an irressistable but sticky dorwning pool. After tow days, throw it out, but dont look. Every cockroach in the entire neighborhood will be in there, piled on top of each other in a sticky mess. You wont see any more cokroaches for months.
Tht ice cream in a bucket trick only CAPTURES cockroaches. It does not exterminate them. The infants and the eggs must be eliminated to stop the pests. Boric acid works well as it causes the infants to die and the cockroach eggs to be eaten by adults.
Mix with sugar and or flour and place in corners and behind appliances where roaches are seen. While it does not harm their exoskeleton as stated, it does cause dehydration when eaten and will actually cause the cockroach to eventually burst. They love it and it is effective as a prevention measure as well as an extermination method as it acts on the adults who eat it themselves, and on the juveniles who eat the adults excrement and are poisoned in that manner.
I was reading this and loving it especially the idea of Chinese chalk. I googled it and found that Chinese chalk is, apparently, dangerous: http://www.epa.gov/opp00001/health/illegalproducts/chalk.htm
I have an even better method…… How about you all show an ounce of compassion and rather than torture them, find ways to deter them from your house. A good first step is to make the house unappealing to them, keep it clean!
you have obviously never had to deal with them… when you move into a new apartment and at midnight you find 4 crawling around in your cutlery drawer your little compassion theory will sound as stupid to you as it does to me. They continue to live off absolutely anything. My roomate and I are super clean, we\’ve been cleaning dishes as soon as we\’re done, making sure everything is dry, even wiping out the bathtub after we shower. So far the Chinese Chalk is working the best but we still need to get the exterminator in for a second time because these pests simply will not die.
Can a garlic kill a cockroach?
Geckos should be self-limiting. Once they eat all the insects, any excess geckos will either pack up and move or die off. These may be illegal to turn loose in areas with laws concerning non-native species.
Obviously one of the people who left comments has never had roaches. You don’t get them because your house is dirty…. what an idiot, if keeping your house clean got rid of them no one would be looking for a method to kill them duh!
live in a rented unit above a coffee shop in arcade of shops, have many cockroaches a can a day which don’t last long, u get rid of them and then at night find them in your bed, in the kettle, on the lounge, etc, how do you get rid of them or keep them under control, hate to think of the restaurants now,
I have had it with these pescky little buggers. I will definitely try the boric acid technique as I need to exterminate the whole lot of them. Forget about feeling sorry for them; they are simply disgusting and cannot be thought of as pets.
“won’t even have time to spread its wings and fly”
WTF cockroaches can FLY???? Are you for real? Jesus!!!!
I think Australian Cockroaches don’t do that…. phew!
Ben, your comment about being surprised that cockroaches can fly cracks me up! haha Unfortunately for us here in Texas, USA, the DO fly! Agh!!!!!!!!!! And yeah, it’s REAL scary!
Fortunately, we also had house geckos migrate to my neighborhood, which is a clean, upper-middle class neighborhood, but nonetheless, cockroaches could be seen on the streets at night and would get inside as well. After the geckos moved in, I NEVER see them anymore!!!! Solved the problem for the entire neighborhood, as far as I know! Yea!!!!
One thing is for sure…. wherever I go, I will always take gecko lizards with me!