Where do cockroaches hang out and what are their habits?
Well, firstly, although leaving food scraps lying around is a surefire way to get a cockroach infestation, you don’t need food to have cockroaches. I know a bloke who once captured a cockroach and put it in a jar to see how long it would take to starve to death.
It took about three months.
No, there is something that attracts cockroaches even more than food – places that are warm, dark, and wet. Favourite places are undersink water heaters, or the backs of fridges.
Also, cardboard boxes, so if you have cardboard boxes neatly stashed in storage somewhere, be careful when you unpack them – you may be in for a rude surprise.
You see, cardboard is a carbohydrate, and cockroaches are not fussy about what they eat. There are, for example, documented cases of cockroaches finding their way into ears. Initially, they do this to nibble on ear hairs, but they sometimes get stuck and have to be removed with tweezers. Yuk!
As I mentioned before, Germans breed indoors, and the other ones breed outdoors.
Germans will house themselves often in electronic components, as they did in my telephone once.
They also love plumbing, particularly drains. If you live in a block of units, for example, then no matter what steps you take to eliminate cockroaches in your own unit, if there are cockroaches in the other units in the same block, then you’ll find cockroaches appearing out of drains and air vents.
For some reason, cockroaches don’t like cars – unlike spiders. I don’t know why that is.
Okay – how do we kill them? We’ll start discussing it tomorrow.