Where do cockroaches come from in a house or apartment? What can be done?

In Russia, 4 types of cockroaches can be found in apartments and premises.

• Red cockroach.
  He's a coward. The pest is copper or reddish-brown in color and measures up to 1.5 centimeters in length. Runs around, afraid of the light. One generation develops in approximately 2–4 months. The colony reproduces faster than other cockroach species. It often comes from neighbors, from basements, and ends up in food bags.
• Black beetle.
  It has a black or brown-brown body with a glossy sheen, measuring up to 3 centimeters in length. Development from egg to adult insect at home in a black cockroach takes about a year. The insect has wings, but does not use them. It comes mainly from sewers.
• Furniture cockroach.
  He is also a brown-striped cockroach. The body is oblong, beige or brown, with a reddish tint. It looks the same as the Prussian, but does not have the black stripes on its head. They mostly run; males can and willingly fly. Can be found in recently purchased furniture, things, and interior items. Unlike other species, furniture cockroaches are undemanding to moisture. They can be found in closets with clothes, cabinets with things, under the floor, in bedrooms and corridors.
• American cockroach.
  A red-brown or brown insect up to 5 centimeters in length. The largest cockroach found in apartments. American cockroach larvae look the same as adults, but are initially off-white in color and only darken over time. Can fly, but prefers to run. They come from sewers, less often through ventilation, and extremely rarely they can fly through windows. They are extremely demanding of moisture and heat, looking for conditions close to tropical.

The most likely sources of the appearance of certain types of cockroaches are only general guidelines, rules, to which there are always exceptions. Each case must be considered separately. The recommendations and information below will help you understand where cockroaches come from in your apartment or house.

How cockroaches get into an apartment

Globally, there are only two options for how cockroaches get into an apartment: they come on their own, and this is the most common reason, or you bring them into the house - this is a rarer scenario. Cockroaches may accidentally end up in:

• Your luggage.
• Bags of groceries and ready-to-eat takeaway food.
• Purchased furniture, used and new.
• Clothes and shoes, if you left them in a wardrobe, locker room or other public place.

Rarely, cockroaches can cling to animal fur during a walk or trip to the country. The further scenario after a cockroach accidentally enters the house depends on luck. If it is a pregnant female or several pests of different sexes at once, they may well establish a new colony in your area. If you find single individuals, immediately destroy them using the good old method of a slipper or newspaper. When cockroaches come from somewhere on their own, it is no longer possible to solve the problem so easily.

In apartment buildings, cockroaches can build their nests in:

• Garbage chute
• Basement
• House structures

If the building is old, its renovation and communications are in poor condition, the likelihood of cockroaches increases significantly. Collapsing materials and leaking pipes create an ideal environment for pests. It is the cracks and cavities in the walls and ceilings that often become the main routes through which cockroaches enter your apartment. In addition to cracks, insects can come:

• By ventilation.
• By hood.
• From the sewer.
• Through open windows and vents.
• On risers in the bathroom, if they are poorly insulated.

The main sign that cockroaches live somewhere in the house and are crawling towards you from there is that your encounters occur regularly, more and more often.

Features of insects

Cockroaches amaze with their vitality. In the absence of normal food, they feed on dust, dirt, dried sweat from clothes, fallen hair, glue in book bindings, and insulation from wires.

Only glass, iron, and some types of plastics are not suitable for food. Pests can live up to two months without food. Parasites do not cope well without water; one drop lasts for several days. The insects will survive absolutely without water for one week.

Even without a head, pests get along well. If for some reason they lose it, a kind of clot forms in its place, although the cockroach continues to live. He can breathe with his whole body, but dies from the inability to get drunk after about a week.

Increased levels of radiation do not have a lethal effect on household pests. In such conditions they even continue to reproduce.

Interesting fact: cockroaches can pretend to be dead. But they do it unconsciously. A special gene was discovered in the insect’s body that causes the parasite to switch off when it eats poison or smells it.

If a dead-looking pest is found, it is swept up into a dustpan and thrown into the trash. There the insect comes to its senses and crawls away. That is why it is recommended to flush dead insects down the toilet and not throw them in the trash!

What cockroaches need in your home

In any city apartment there will always be suitable conditions for cockroaches. For a comfortable life, pests need:

• Access to your groceries and pet food. Crumbs from the table and garbage in the trash can also count.
• Availability of a large number of water sources. Leaking taps, communications, batteries, regular watering of flowers, drops of tea and other drinks are ideal.
• Dark and secluded places with high humidity where you can lay eggs and wait until dusk.
• Warm. Thanks to heating, cockroaches can actively reproduce and develop all year round.

Failure to comply with hygiene rules, household sloppiness, clutter in the house and dilapidated renovations make the apartment especially attractive to pests, however, cockroaches can also appear in those houses where the situation may be exactly the opposite. That is, by and large, no one is safe from the appearance of cockroaches.

Why do they appear again?

In some cases, after treating the premises with poisonous agents against domestic parasites, they appear again. The owners blame it on low-quality poison and unscrupulous work of specialists. Although the reason may be different.

Not all toxic substances act on parasite eggs. Only adult individuals die, the clutches of eggs remain intact, they are in special hard shells - larvae. It is difficult for toxic compounds to penetrate there.

After a certain time, a new generation of pests is born. They scatter around the area. They come to the attention of apartment owners who think that their old cockroaches have returned to them.

Where do cockroaches come from in a new building?

Sometimes pests appear even in places where, according to all the laws of logic, they should not be, for example, in newly built houses that are not even really inhabited by people yet. Where do cockroaches come from in a new building? There may be several reasons.

• At the stage of construction and finishing of premises, workers lived crowdedly directly in the apartments. Eating right at your workplace every day, without particularly worrying about cleaning, is enough to attract pests.
• If people are already moving into a new building, it is quite possible that they brought cockroaches with them from their previous apartment and the insects are colonizing new territories.
• A recently opened grocery store or cafe on the ground floor of a house can become a source of very rapid appearance of cockroaches even in a new house.
• Maintenance of new homes in the initial stages can leave much to be desired. Interruptions in heating and water supply, utility failures, lack of routine sanitary inspections of the home for pests and irregular garbage collection quickly create comfortable conditions for the appearance of pests. The situation can develop especially rapidly in houses where there is a garbage disposal.

For humans, moving to a new building is a major and lengthy process, but for insects it looks completely different. Their extremely developed sensory organs, lightning-fast speed of movement relative to their body size, and reproduction rate allow them to quickly find food over long distances, accurately determine its location and establish colonies of thousands nearby in record time.

When moving

Penetration of cockroaches is possible when moving from an old apartment to a new one. This way you can take over the old tenants along with your belongings.

It is enough to take the eggs of parasites, not adults. Insects love to settle in the folds of upholstered furniture and mattresses. There are a lot of them in wooden cabinets, boxes, and books.

When moving, it is difficult to maintain cleanliness. And patient parasites can survive long journeys in poor conditions. For food they will find something inedible, but suitable to satisfy their hunger.

What to do if cockroaches crawl from your neighbors?

If cockroaches live and breed directly in your neighbors’ apartment, you need to approach the problem from three sides at once:

• Use all possible means to block the paths through which insects get into your house.
• Destroy all parasites that have already penetrated you, including their eggs, larvae, nests and traces of vital activity.
• Ensure that neighbors begin to solve the problem with insects on their part, in their apartment.

Fighting cockroaches in itself requires significant effort, time and money, but sometimes it is communication with other people that becomes the most difficult stage in pest control. When cockroaches crawl from your neighbors, choose your tactics depending on the situation.

Talk

First, try asking your neighbors if they even have cockroaches. It is not a fact that the source of infection is actually located in their apartment; it can also be in common areas of the house. Don’t start a scandal right away and don’t make claims until you find out all the circumstances. If you have adequate neighbors, dialogue is enough for cooperation and further solving the problem with cockroaches in the house together - no one is interested in voluntary cohabitation with insects.

The only case when you shouldn’t go to your neighbors on your own is if people with mental disabilities, alcohol or drug addiction live behind your wall.

Complain

If you cannot go to your neighbors yourself or you are unable to solve the problem through dialogue, you can complain to the local police officer and at the same time report the presence of cockroaches to the building management company. The district police officer will talk to your neighbors, the management company will check the building for the presence of synanthropic insects and organize the necessary work on the territory of the house.

Contact higher authorities

If this does not help, you can contact higher authorities:

• Housing inspection
• Rospotrebnadzor
• Court

These measures are already extreme. Resort to them only when previous solutions to the problem do not work.

Receipt by mail

Currently, online shopping is very popular. They are delivered via mail. This type of delivery can bring mustachioed parasites into the house.

Previously, this is how these parasites spread throughout the world. This is how completely uncharacteristic black, American representatives appeared in our latitudes.

Slava, Belebey:

“We ordered things from the online store. They arrived without any problems, but with an unpleasant surprise - a cockroach jumped out. We have a complaint against the post office - they, of course, deny it, they refer to the sender, I don’t know who to believe. There were no products in the package, what should he do? Now at the post office they sell everything, just like in a store, there may be cockroaches. You have to be careful."

What to do if cockroaches live in an apartment building?

If cockroaches crawl into your apartment, this does not mean that they live with your closest neighbors. Pests can be found throughout the entire house at the same time and use the entire communication system of the building to move around. In such a situation, both you and your neighbors find themselves on an equal footing. What to do if you encounter such a problem?

When cockroaches appear in an apartment building, it is necessary to treat all common areas of the building with the help of SES. If you have a management company, you need to contact the control room and report the appearance of insects. Now even individual complaints can be effective, but it is still advisable to apply collectively. After receiving your application, the management company will check the house for the presence of arthropods and carry out all the necessary work to destroy them.

If there are no special conditions in your agreement with the management company, the treatment of the house will be carried out at the expense of utilities, that is, no additional contributions will be required from you.

note

The management company, if necessary, carries out disinfestation only in the common areas of the house - basements, elevator shafts, attics, garbage collection chambers, staircases, entrances, etc. In apartments, pest control for cockroaches is always organized and paid for by the homeowners.

Breaking in with guests' belongings

In some cases, guests bring more insects with their belongings. This does not happen on purpose, because small parasites do not get into bags for the purpose of traveling.

Insects are constantly looking for food and water, this leads them to different places, including into human bags. They emerge in a completely different apartment.

Don't be afraid that if you put your hand into your bag, you might stumble upon a cockroach. If he is there, he will hide and not reveal his presence. His task is to go unnoticed. Domestic cockroaches are nocturnal parasites. They prefer to go out in the dark, when everything is quiet.

Matvey. Nizhny Novgorod Region:

“A friend, a student, came to visit my daughter in the summer. Apparently she brought us cockroaches with her things, because we didn’t have any before. In the student dormitory, of course, there are a lot of them, we were students ourselves, we remember. Cockroaches do not take root here; we know how to prepare boric acid for them. They don’t like it, but the students weren’t happy, they all died.”

What to do if cockroaches live in an apartment?

To get rid of cockroaches in an apartment you need to:

• Inspect the apartment and block all the ways that pests can get to you, pay special attention to ventilation, windows, doors, sewer network, and the state of repairs in the house.
• Temporarily tighten the rules of hygiene in the house - throw out garbage more often, wash dishes immediately after eating, clean more thoroughly and wash all surfaces from the floor to the top shelves of drawers in the kitchen.
• Poison the cockroaches that live in your apartment.

It is advisable to immediately use highly effective pest control methods. The longer you use measures that don't work as well as they should, the more cockroaches you get. If household insecticides are used without success, insects may develop resistance to certain groups of drugs, which makes their destruction even more difficult. At SES “Des Group” you can order cockroach poisoning urgently or on a day convenient for you and get rid of them with just 1 treatment with a guarantee of results.

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Helpful advice

If you begin to notice cockroaches in your home, immediately after calling the SES, also contact the management company of your home by calling the control room. Pest control will be much more effective if treatments are carried out throughout the entire building at once.

Along with the purchase

You can bring pests home with food from a store, supermarket, or market. They can easily sneak into a bag and wait for the right time to come out.

It is difficult to notice them; they are able to take cover well, hide in small crevices, and crawl through narrow passages. Just one brought female will give rise to an entire colony of parasites.

When buying clothes or other non-food items, insects get into bags by accident. This can happen all the time in food aisles. This is especially true for markets that are poorly controlled.

Continuous prevention

Not only humans, but also some types of insects – cockroaches – want to live in a cozy, beautiful apartment. In order not to share housing with them, it is necessary to constantly apply preventive measures, even if the parasites have not been seen for a long time, they can appear suddenly. The table shows simple preventive measures against domestic parasites.

While constantly ensuring the cleanliness of your home, you still sometimes have to deal with the appearance of cockroaches.

Now knowing the reason for this, you can take measures to get rid of unwanted guests. It’s better to prepare – take preventive measures, this will protect your home from many pests.