Are There Any Easy Ways to Kill Roaches
If you’ve had roaches for a while, it’s easy to imagine you being at your wit’s end. There are few worse feelings than being lost in your thoughts and getting startled by a roach. They dart out of nowhere and run off faster than you can smack them… And no matter what you try, it seems like they keep coming back. So why can you seem to kill every roach, but they always return? This article will cover why roaches are so hard to kill and get rid of.
Can I Kill Roaches I See?
Sure, you could do that. You might have trouble, though. They’re very resilient to physical impacts, and it takes a lot of canned bug spray to eliminate even a single roach. In the meantime, it’ll be scurrying around trying to get away from you, spreading bacteria. Even if you manage to chop one’s head off (A little weird, admittedly), the roach can survive for days.
What Makes Roaches So Tough?
Like mosquitoes and beetles and spiders, a squish usually ends things with most bugs. This isn’t so with roaches. Roaches are uniquely designed to resist being smashed. Their exoskeleton is also ridiculously strong for an insect. Their bodies are built of several overlapping plates of armor. A very stretchy membrane connects this armor… Meaning it can stretch and squash in all kinds of directions without damage. This membrane is also what lets them fit in tight spaces.
Additionally, they’ve got cytochrome P450 genes in their DNA. As a result, their bodies produce chemicals that help them detoxify and survive in toxic environments. This is why you hear people say roaches can survive a nuclear blast – A bit of an urban legend, sure… But roaches wouldn’t have much of a problem with radioactive fallout.
Why Do Roaches Keep Coming Back?
We hate to bring you bad news, but… The roaches you see are maybe a single percent of an area’s roach population. Most of them live behind walls and fixtures, inside slow-moving pipes, and up in the crawlspace. Roaches prefer dark and isolated places where they can find scraps of food… Even if that food is other dead roaches. This is why it can seem like you’ve killed all of them, only for more to come around after their hidden food is gone.
Or, you could be seeing hatched baby roaches. Roaches reproduce like crazy, and without predators, their populations explode. Each female roach lays nearly 50 eggs at a time. When these eggs hatch, you have a couple of months before more roaches reach reproductive maturity. Populations skyrocket with this rapid reproductive cycle.
Is There an Easy Way to Kill Roaches?
Can traps kill roaches? Sure, they can. Several traps on the market advertise an ability to kill roaches “guaranteed.” Unfortunately, these will only thin numbers. It’s almost less effective than just smashing them. Some roaches can survive traps, making more durable offspring. There’s also a variety of foggers and sprays… This is also ineffective.
Do foggers work? Well, no, sadly. What a fogger will do is spread roaches around the house. Most roaches stick close to a territorial scavenging ground. When you use a fogger, roaches are intelligent enough to know they should go somewhere else. This means you could turn one infested room into two or three.
When the roaches start breeding, you now have multiple breeding populations instead of just one. Foggers make the issue worse, full stop. You can read our website to learn about other potential roach remedies, but the DIY approach is risky.
So how do you get rid of roaches? That’s easy. The first time you see even a single roach, give us a call. The professional approach is the only surefire option to get rid of your roach problem for good.
