Roaches are unsanitary and unpleasant and what's worse? Cockroaches carry food pathogens and airborne pathogens that can cause food poisoning and respiratory problems respectively. Get a professional exterminator in the Charlotte, NC area to help with your cockroach problem. One fertile female cockroach can lay an average of 150-400 eggs in its lifetime. These insects exist in packs; if you see a cockroach somewhere in your house, there's a very likely chance your house is already infested.
Roach Extermination
To further aggravate matters, they are not that easy to kill, they can survive temperatures as low as 0°C, underwater, and even extended periods of food and oxygen deprivation. Most disturbing of all, a cockroach can live up to 7 days without its head, talk about resilience. The last thing you want to see is one headless cockroach scurrying around your house. Regardless of if you have just one cockroach or it is a full-fledged roach infestation, it can be very disturbing.
Here are some guidelines to follow that will prevent the extermination of this disease-carrying pest from your house:
- Identify & Fix The Problem Sites: Before you can tackle a roach infestation, you need to examine your house and identify its hideouts first. Search for possible hiding spots, especially dark corners, cracks, and crevices in shelves and cabinets, underneath refrigerators and sinks, etc. After locating all their possible hiding spots, the next important thing to do is to seal off these points. Using caulk, block off their entry routes - cracks in walls, crevices, and holes. This won't do anything to reduce an already existing population but it will prevent cockroaches on the outside from coming in.
- Treat With Traps & Bait Stations: Place roach glue strips and gel baits in strategic positions around their hideouts and occasionally check on the area. The glue strips will trap the cockroach and prevent it from escaping back to their hiding spots. On the other hand, gel baits attract cockroaches into stations where they feed on poisonous substances that eventually kill them. This method will leave a lot of dead cockroaches lying around so it may not be the most convenient of treatment options.
- Treat With Chemicals: The most popular chemical treatment is with boric acid - a chemical mixture of boron and water. It is low in toxicity to humans but deadly to roaches. However, it is often misapplied, and in such cases, it loses its effectiveness. The use of over-the-counter pesticides and insecticides also works. Still, it should be noted that some of these insecticides and pesticides contain chemicals that can be harmful to humans. Moreover, roaches are extremely adaptable, so these chemicals may have little or no effect at all on them.
- Hire An Expert: Finally, hiring a pest management professional is the most effective way of going about roach extermination. These trained professionals have the expertise, tools, and products necessary to handle a roach infestation. Additionally, they have safety measures they follow to ensure that the procedures used do not have any hazardous impact on human health. More importantly, using a pest management service also means you do not have to deal with dead roaches lying around the house as they need to be cleaned up afterward. Get in touch with a pest control agency, discuss the treatment options, and get your house the treatment it deserves. It is hard enough to control an already existing population of roaches, the last thing you want to do in that case is increase their number.
The best control measure is prevention. As mentioned earlier, seal off all possible entry points, keep your house and the surroundings as clean as possible, adopt proper food storage measures, and take out the garbage regularly. The time it takes for roach extermination depends on the type of species and the level of infestation. All the same, develop a plan and decide on the best treatment method for your household. You can employ as many treatment options as you please, nothing beats the comfort of a roach-free house.