Ask Lemmy

Every summer I get ants. I thought the doggos tracked them in on their paws but when they passed, we still got ants every goddamn summer. So many. Then spiders. The big ass thick butted ugly ass spiders. Those bitches just don't care about their lives. My daily routine in the summer is rinsing at least three spiders down the drain while I shower.

Cockroaches. First it was larvae. I was scared of rice for months after that. But my whole apartment was unhealthy, I moved.

I had bed bugs, we had to throw bed and mattress away, wash all clothes again and again, use steam everywhere until we moved, what was planned anyway. We didn't bring any bug with us but we use some pesticide on our furniture.

I dealt with food moths few times, but that's easy. I just threw the food where the moths are –rice, tea, floor...–, deep clean the kitchen, put everything in the freezer for 48h minimum, then put all the food in glass jars. Now, I still put my floor and sugar in the freezer before storing it, and try to put all dry food in glass jars or metal boxes for tea and coffee.

When I have ants, I leave something sweet outside, on their path, so I don't have to kill them. It works.

I had a pantry moth infestation as a result of inheriting birds. No matter what you do if you buy seed you will get moths again and again. It was pretty fucking bad at its worst… at night I would spray a paper plate with cooking spray and just swat them down with it next to the light. Highly effective.

But then I stumbled across trichogramma wasps. And it was literally life changing.

They are stingless, self-fertile (all female due to a bacterial infection, if you give them antibiotics they produce males again!), egg parasitic wasps, about the size of a grain of sand. They lay their eggs inside the host species eggs and their young consume the host egg. Once they hatch you never see them again. Tiny dots. You order them 15k or so at a time (depending on website and country probably? but they should be pretty widely available) and if you release them outside as intended, they kill off 95% of the target species (they prefer what they hatch from, which is usually moth eggs, but they can parasitize tons of pest insects). Indoors they can wipe out pest eggs. Then they die off because they are obligate egg parasites. No host eggs, no more wasps.

You need to release them for several waves to be sure, due to moth life cycles taking many months to complete, but they are cheap af (I paid $12 USD/15,000, ordered them every 3 months for 1.5 yrs, zero moths after) Zero work, and no chemicals.

I tell everyone who has birds about them now. I gifted the local bird rescue a 2-year delivery schedule, and made sure to tell everyone about it so they could pass the info along to any adoptees who might be turned off by the moth problem down the line and decide against adopting the bird(s)

Jehovah's Witness ? Yeah, told them to fuck off amd they did.

mice,family members(hoarders) refuse to clean up thier house is too lazy(also too lazy to paint the front of the house because pain has been stripping off for quite a while and neighbors are starting to make noise about it(through subterfuge), had 3 infestation, coinciding with weather, '16, '20 and currently one that started in the garage. we only used glue traps. but if mice dont get caught, they start to recognize the traps and avoid it, only naive and young mice get caught. we still manage to catch quite a few of them as the infestation was not as heavy as the last 2 because we were prepared with traps we recently bought off amazon. and i started noticed they are picking up the glue traps that are totally unusalbe from the trash and trying reuse them,hoarding.

A few years ago we had a problem with teenage girls in the bathroom. Basically made it unusable for most of the day.

Glad to say they have now graduated college and the problem worked itself out.

Childhood spring one year, conditions were perfect for millipedes. The basement floor was covered in them. I mean covered with the floor barely visible.

They weren't damaging or dangerous, just disgusting. My dad put on his outdoor shoes and just walked around in tiny steps smashing them. He walked for hours. Then scraped them up with a plastic snow shovel and threw them outdoors for the birds to go wild. Then walked some more.

No other spring since has resulted in those sorts of numbers. It was interesting to see my dad's reaction: the disgust and fascination and satisfaction. God help him if he ever discovers pimple popper videos and the like, we would lose him to the algorithm.

Cockroaches. It was bad. They were everywhere. You couldn't open a door without them falling from the cracks in the doorframe on your face.

Boric acid is what helped as recommended by reddit. We used to clean, and spray with Pyrethrins before that but that only kills the visible ones. Most of the roaches are in their holes and you'll never reach them like that.

What's great about boric acid is that it kills slowly meaning they can infect each other before they die in a chain reaction. They infect even the hidden ones when they go groom each other.

So clean the area, dry it, then just spread the powder where they usually hang out. It'll take a week to notice any effects. Apply again if area gets wet.

Another great thing is unless you ingest a huge amount or inhale it in your lungs, boric acid is mostly safe for humans. Unlike the sprays which always gave us symptoms.

Termites.

Mutiple professional treatments to eradicate them from the property and surrounds, then major structural repairs, for which the place had to be vacant.

0/10, do not recommend.

Where I live, there are American cockroaches. The good thing is that they don't nest in homes, so their presence isn't a commentary on your cleanliness. But they do wander into homes looking for food. And guys, they're huge! Like you can hear them crawling.

I asked the pest control guy if there was a way to be finally rid of them and he said "move".

Wasps nested in my walls. I sucked them out with a Vacuum then put in some insecticide.

We got roaches from an Amazon package, I suspect. My wife and I are both compulsively clean people, but we live in an older place so there is ostensibly decades worth of random organic material around to sustain roach colonies. It started one spring with seeing some instars around the kitchen every few days and then it became full roaches about a week later. I did not take it seriously at first and just treated with hardware store sprays and powders. This was insufficient.

What eventually worked was baits and a little chemical called Alpine WSG. I bought a sprayer and basically coated the entire house in it twice, six weeks apart. We have not seen a single roach since then. I respray once per year just in case.

Also, boric acid doesn't work with German roaches. It is a waste of time. If you solved roach problem with that or diatomaceous earth, then you had a entry problem, not an infestation.

We also had racoons breeding in our attic at one point, which is a very awkward situation because I felt bad trapping them so I just waited for them to leave and then sealed where they were getting in.

Mouse. Singular. Cat.

I had a pair of foxes raise a litter of kits under my garden shed. They were so cute and fun to watch!

Well they left me with fleas. I had to seal off the foundation of the shed, cut holes in the floor, and drop some nasty pesticides (phosgene) under, and seal it back up.

Flying ants. We bought a new house that had a major problem with "alates".

Tried dealing with them on our own, but they just kept coming and because there was no food supply for them, they'd die anyway in 24 hours or so. Our windows got full of dead ants.

Called Orkin. They came out, did their thing, gone in 24 hours.

https://www.orkin.com/pests/ants/winged-ants

Bed bugs made us burn our furniture. In the end we still paid several hundred dollars for an exterminator cause they were that persistent.

I lived in a cheap studio in Boston that was infested with roaches. Every 3-4 months I would spray Raid where the walls met the floor and that always worked well until they gradually started appearing again.

I lived in another studio that got a bedbug infestation. My building's management paid for the place to be heat treated -- they wheeled in two giant space heaters and had them powered by a generator on a truck five stories below on the street. I never saw another one again, but it destroyed all my books.

Nowadays I'm way more picky about where I live and I haven't had any pest issues in over a decade.

Got the occasional mouse, but I usually only notice after my cats got to them first.

Or they hunt them outside and bring the corpse back, really couldn't tell.

Not me, but my parents, though I discovered it during a visit.

Bats. They had a bat infestation. This was up at the highest point of the house in the loft, they were remodeling and left the walls open - a hole to the outside let one in, and I guess a bunch decided it was a nice place to hang out. There were dozens.

As for dealing with it - bats are endangered, so you can't exterminate them. If I remember correctly the total spend was just over 10 grand. This also included installing multiple permanent one way doors so if any bats manage to get in again, they have multiple ways to get out.

three times:

1. rats - tore out two walls and a ceiling looking for their ingress. Found the hole, sealed it, took advantage of the situation to insulate and refinish the room, no problems since.

2. mice - set traps while improving home infra. Raised shelves, removed things acting at mouse ladders, started keeping grains in sealed, hard-sided containers. Went around the outside of the house removing clutter and harboring plants, planted herbs that repel rodents instead. Sprayed essential oils for several weeks as a deterrent, and placed a few permanent traps as check for effectiveness. No mice in the years since.

3. water roaches - boiled or threw out the items they seemed attracted to, used chemical scent obliterators on any adjacent surfaces. Placed pet-safe gel poison behind all the furniture in the kitchen. No problems since.

The joys of a fixer-upper home.

The ongoing pests are flies and birds. This summer I'll be exposing and reinsulating the vent area above the finished attic and replacing the damaged louvers that the birds have nested in. The flies seem to crawl straight through the window sashes, though, no idea how to solve that one.

I've had fruit flies before that must have come in on some produce, have to be on it to clear them, leave out any fruit/veg scraps and they come out (out being tossed in the trash/green bin too, anything open air). Drop of dish soap, water and vinegar in a high walled glass or jar is the way to do it, I used balsamic but malt or wine vinegar works too, just leave that out and it'll do its job.

My current place we jokingly call the spider house, have a bunch of house spiders around (cats love them) and a few orb-weavers, garden and wolf spiders outside, pretty much anything native isn't a threat to humans or cats, they do a great job of taking out any pests, rarely see flies inside these days. Spiders and centipedes I'll leave alone, they're beneficial to have around.

We got Carpenter ants around the front entrance to the house one year, had to call an exterminator to spray the nest, which was outside under the front porch. Those little fuckers stuck around for weeks afterwards, which is apparently how long the poison takes to eradicate them all.

We pretty much always have mice in the attic, despite the exterminator calls and the snap-traps we set. Occasionally we catch one in the garage. They never manage to infiltrate the rest of the house because we have 5 cats and each one lives for the moment a mouse is spotted so that they can catch it and play with its barely-breathing corpse before they try to eat it. We don't use rodent poison for that reason, just in case the cats get one.

As a student, I heard scratching noises behind the drywall over my bed. Assuming it were mice, I got some mouse traps and set them up in the attic. No success, although the bait did vanish.

So I took a better light with me and found a wasps nest between the roof tiles and the plasterboard.

Borrowed a large bottle of pressurized CO2 and froze those suckers to death.

Old house. Mice are seasonal for us. We get one or two in the fall when they start looking for shelter for the winter, and again in the spring when they start exploring/multiplying. We used traps, Now that we have cats though, they mostly stay away or get caught.

Nearly every NYC apartment has pest issues. Landlords don't actually give a fuck about resolving them, so I end up doing most of it. I've had roaches, mice, and all colors of mold.

Mice are the most annoying. Unfortunately glue traps are the only traps that work on them, but I would check them often and Ol' Yeller any stuck mice I found with a crossbow. Instant lights out.

I was once renting a room, where due to part my lack of cleanliness (basically not throwing out garbage frequently enough, i waited for a week or two) and my rooms window being right above a flower bed (and i kept the windows open for the most time) and my room being moist for the most time (i dried clothes in my room) I got lots of small red bugs (hundreds or thousands). they did not bite, but they were annoying. I had a few bad weeks, so i also did not care about them at the time.

To get rid of them, I had a multi part strategy, basically 1 was trying to physically force them out - by raising the room temp to high, and cycling window open and close, and also cleaning out my room better (taking garbage every 2 or 3 days), worked partially well (maybe more than half gone). Other was to use a chemical irritant (i used a mix of dettol and water) to spray on their usual spots, and llet them be dry otherwise, and stopped drying clothes inside. Once I got to getting rid of them, I got it in a week or so.

Also where i live currently, it is musquitos. They are everywhere where I live, kinda a public health issue which is largely outside our scope. I cant really do much against them. General advice is to keep surroundings clean and minimise their breeding spots. My folks do try to kill them with the zapping rackets, but that is almost lost cause.

Rats. Killed two a night with traps. They'd keep coming.

Got a cat.

I live in an old house, so sometimes mice find their way in. Never really a huge problem though. I catch them with live traps and let them out a few km away. Don't think I've had any in the last couple months.