Carry in the Groceries, Not the Cockroaches
If you have boxes stacked or stored in your home, you may have built more than just a roach motel—but a luxury roach resort. Not only do these creepy critters love to munch on scraps of food, they’re especially drawn to cardboard.
Cockroaches Can’t Resist Cardboard
First off, German cockroaches gobble up the stuff, especially if it’s been used to cart food around (think about how you get your groceries home from those big club warehouses). Second, used cardboard, in particular, offers a nice, dark, warm place for them to hide out—and reproduce.
In fact, if you’re using those empty food boxes at the checkout to carry your groceries home, you may inadvertently be offering first-class travel accommodations to the cockroaches that have already called dibs on them.
Same goes for paper bags. Cockroaches love them for both their fiber and the shelter that stacks of them can provide. Some major grocers have eliminated single-use plastic bags from their check-outs in defense of the environment, leaving shoppers with only paper bags to tote their groceries home. While this is a fantastic move for those eager to go green, these retailers might be unwittingly inviting cockroaches into their paper bag supplies.
Getting ready to move, or just finished unpacking from a recent relocation? Get rid of those moving boxes while there’s still time. If you haven’t already packed, be sure to use new boxes, not upcycled ones, or else you may end up with more residents in your new home than you had anticipated.
When you do pack, be sure to both package and transport food separately, and to seal your boxes tightly and completely, especially if they’ll be sitting around for days or weeks until the day of the big move.
Cockroaches can and do live anywhere, but they especially gravitate toward places where we humans store, prepare and serve our food. That’s why, when it comes to the health of your home’s kitchen, you should have a pest control program in place to protect against them.
Cockroaches: A Constant Bane on Existence
Humans have been dealing with these nasty pests since the dawn of civilization. In fact, cockroaches predate our young 200,000 year history by more than tenfold. The fossil evidence suggests the earliest German cockroaches were scurrying around as far back as 300 million years ago.
Human history is steeped in cockroach lore, sometimes literally. In China, one particular breeding site grows six billion cockroaches at a time for use in “healing potions.” In traditional Chinese medicine, ground cockroach carcasses are said to cure everything from respiratory ailments to bellyaches.
Since they’ve had so much more time to figure out how to survive on Earth than we have, cockroaches can sometimes seem almost downright clever. They can break in almost anywhere they want to go, which is why it’s important to have a preventative plan in place to nip the population in the bud before it becomes a problem.
Prevention is Our Preference
It’s far easier, after all, to keep your home free of cockroaches to begin with than it is to eradicate not only the bugs you see, but the countless scores more hiding from plain sight, including the ones that haven’t even hatched yet.
Whether you’ve got a cockroach problem in your home or you’d rather avoid one, fall is the best time to take action, as cooler temperatures push the critters indoors. Keep roaches out of your home, and contact us for more information or to schedule a free quote.
