Insecticides, stick-on traps, the good old, reliable slippers or what-have-yous. Name it I’ve tried every means possible to get rid of cockroaches in my apartment. But their breeding rate, which is faster than the rate I could exterminate them, is just simply unbelievable.
Do all households here in Taiwan have cockroaches? If you have successfully made your homes roach-free, could you let me know how you did it?
*NB: I always try to maintain the cleanliness of my place yet to no avail. I wonder where these pesky, little (oh some of them are big!) critters come from?
A single big one now and again means this:
Roach has come in through the window or door or other opening from outside. It’s looking for food and a shag. Kill it, and you’ve killed the problem.
Lots of little ones means this:
Roaches have laid eggs in your apartment. Killing the ones you see may help, but the underlying problem will always be there.
Better find a new place to live or call in specialists to decontaminate your place. Killing the eggs is hard (i think they use steam guns or something), likely to fail, and will probably be time-consuming and expensive.
We used a bug bomb – one of those devices that comes in a can. You close all the doors and windows, open the can, leave it in the middle of the house and go out for a few hours.
Come back, sweep up the bodies and that’s it. We had to do it twice, but we had a pretty stubborn infestation.
Make sure you haven’t put any bleach or household cleaners into your toilet, though, or you might get an explosion.
Lots of these strong pesticides and cleansers are not compatible!
I had the ‘big one now and then’ problem. probably one every few days. I’ve used the little ‘poison releasing bags’ you eavearound the place for a month and haven’t seen one since.
Anyone know just what attracts cockroaches? I kept the place pretty clean and they didn’t seem to even be in the dirty places. it seems liek they were going for places with paper or wood or something.
If you kill roaches, other roaches are attracted to the murder site. Meaning, the more you kill, the more will come.
Maybe the bug bombs work, but think of the chemicals you’re releasing into the atmosphere…yuk!
get a cat! it works!
they hunt them down and sometimes eat them. they bat them around a bit and tear their nasty little bodies into shreads.
one more thing. roaches don’t carry disease, so why are we all freaked out by them? i think there’s a bit of roach discrimination going on around here. Moderators!!??
The crux here is cleanliness. Roaches must eat and if the environment is clean of food, they move on. There is little chance that you can rid an apartment of all roaches, but keeping the place clean and, where needed, disinfected (roaches feed on all sorts of scum) will go a long way toward eliminating the buggers.
By the way, cockroaches carry no disease and, in spite of their looks, are quite clean.
By the way II: If you don’t like noxious insecticides in your house, try this: find some coarse powder (not the baby kind) and sprinkle it along the suspected pathways used by the roaches. As they travel through this, they pick up particles which rub against their legs and bodies. This rubs a “raw spot” which puts a hole in the protective and air-tight “coating” that surrounds every roach. The insect will then not be able to maintain its internal moisture and will, in essence, dehydrate to death.
Don’t you wish you had taken entomology in school now?
One problem with cockroaches that hasn’t been addressed is the face that they don’t just infest one apartment–they go through the whole building. Though your apartment may be as antiseptic and ridden with cockroach-killing wares, your sloppy neighbor could possibly be breeding them faster than you kill them.
Some buildings have tenants that cooperate with each other more often. It’s a long shot–but you might want to talk with your neighbors about a group effort.
The strange thing in our apartment is that every once awhile we will see a big one in our bathroom! I don’t get it. There is no food in there, what could they be in there for?
Anyway, here’s some advice that works for me and my housemates. Get a caulk gun and plug up whatever holes you can find where roaches get in. We tried that and it has worked quite well.
By the way I find this discussion very helpful! Wished I had found this web site just a little earlier.
Cover yourself in that fructose water stuff. Lie down naked on the floor. It may not kill the roaches, but it sure feels good when they wallk all over your sticky genitals!
Personal favourite…When you see one crawing along the kitchen get a cup of boiling water from your handy water heater and throw, instant death! Ocassionally get a very satisfying ‘scream’ from the raoch, presumably for boiling vapour exploding from it’s little airtight shell! Secondly you can buy cans of roach spray from your local supermarket, not the stuff with English writing, get the real good stuff, probably banned in most countries, with the Chinese only writing. Spray liberally under and behind fridges presses etc, around drain pipes. Don’t forget under doors or other path ways as this stuff leaves a residue that’ll stay for weeks and kill em. Vacate the area, or wear a gas mask and stay to watch the fun. Pretty quickly the roaches leg it from their hiding places in search of fresh air, so you can given 'em a direct blast! Pretty good stuff and great entertainment, keeps the place roach free for quite a while and the roaches come out in the open, so you don’t have dozens of dead bodies under your fridge! Best not to step on roaches either, as you can end up tramping eggs stuck to your shoe all over your apartment…
Hey, I’ve noticed people here use ‘DDT’ a lot. Is this really real DDT (the stuff that’s banned in most countries) or has the word ‘DDT’ just entered the language to mean ‘insect poison’?
This worked for me once, and it’s an ecologically friendly way to rid a house of roaches.
Once I spotted two roaches in my bathroom. Again, why were they in the bathroom? I don’t know. There’s no food in there.
The first roach I smashed with my foot. None of this chasing it around the bathroom. I usually don’t do this, because as you know roaches in Taiwan are quite big and leave a big mess when you smash them.
Then I caught the second roach, its mate, with my bare hands. Then I rubbed its nose in the dead carcass and mush of the first roach, much like you rub the nose of a puppy in its own poo after its done its business on your carpet. I made sure the second roach got a good a whiff of its dead mate.
Then I let the second roach go. It scrambled back into some whole. After that I never saw any more roaches in my apartment again. The second roach likely told all of its roach friends what had happened, and they never showed their faces around my place again.
Pretty cool trick, huh. Now don’t you all wish you read Machiavelli’s The Prince in high school?
Roaches and humans have a symbiotic relationship. We offer them shelter and nourishment, and in return they keep our toothbrushes free and clean of food particulates and toothpaste scale.
Elimination of the roach disturbs this balance and causes undue oral hygiene problems. Having not been to the dentist in about 3 years, I welcome roaches and applaud their efforts.