For the past two months I have been on a bug killing spree. I am guilty of being a very non-eco friendly person lately in my treatment of bugs and I am not happy about it.  I would definitely never make it in one of those religions where you’re forbidden to kill living things. First I committed premeditated murder on the ants that kept appearing daily in an upstairs bathroom (why they did not choose the downstairs guest bathroom is beyond me). They were getting stepped on anyway I figured, I was constantly picking up little mushed bodies. The live ones were way too fast to try and “save” or put out the window. The ants must have been attracted to the water in the plumbing, that’s why they were there. I broke down and put some of those ant traps in the room (Wired Magazine needs to do one of their articles on what is in those, like they recently did with Liquid-Plumr.) Of course the ingredients were not printed on the ant trap package, so god knows what chemicals I am fouling the planet with, but I really didn’t want to scare my guests with an ant farm in the bathroom. The ants seem to have gone away, but then again it might just be that the thirsty ants are gone. If they were there for the water, it’s possible those little black boxes would have been of no interest to them anyway. I only hope I did not kill any ants outside, or any more than I needed to. Ok, just checking out the “Hot Shot Ant Bait” site and this is what I did by using those:
- Kills ants in 24 hours!
- Destroys the entire colony, including the queen
- Unique attractant gets ants to the bait fast so they die fast
- The bait food is carried back to the nest to kill the queen and destroy the entire colony
I am seriously one big hypocrite. Not only did I kill the ants in the bathroom, I pretty much massacred thousands of them. Great. All I wanted to do was stop them from traipsing through my bathroom…
A second type of creepy-crawly that I unenthusiastically smooshed a few of is the Wood Roach. I originally saw one of these guys in a friend’s house in Yarmouthport. His home was very clean, so I assumed it to be more of an “outside” bug than an inside pest and I was right. These animated critters can be found in any wooded area, and on occasion they get inside but it’s really not where they want to be. In a blog from a real estate company “Peters Real Estate” based in Eastham, I found some enlightening info on the topic of these “country roaches”:
It is not interested in human food and does not carry any diseases or contaminants. It lives outdoors, especially in woods or garden areas.  Their crime? They resemble an immature cockroach quite closely when they are not moving, being tan and flat with wings that appear to be shell-like when closed. In fact, they are referred to as the “spotted roach” because of several blue dots visible through a magnifying glass on their underside, or the “pine roach” or “wood roach” because of their native habitat. They are NOT cockroaches (German roaches) and, in fact, have more in common with moths than their distant German cousin.   There is no chemical method of removing (exterminating) wood roaches because of their outdoor habitat.  The old adage, “Where there’s one, there’s more” is not true indoors for these outdoor bugs.
This info was great to find, and indeed these guys are kind of cute. However, I don’t particularly like having the occasional visitor in the house - I don’t want to scare my guests with these roach impersonators!
The third and most recent country bug I have dealt with is what I think are “Cluster Flies” (ew). I live in an old-ish house which is by no means air tight, the cellar, for example, has a partial dirt floor. Occasionally a critter gets in. Either one of those critters died creating a smorgasbord for a lady fly to lay her eggs, or as a fellow Cape Cod resident mentioned to me today, “it’s just the season”.  I hung some fly tape for the week they visited me but the flies were much more interested in hanging out on cellar windows – not being let out – just hanging out À la “Amityville Horror”.  These I have no problem killing, they do carry all manner of disgusting diseases. Flies are great – outside – they pollinate plants and clean up decomposing matter. I wouldn’t recommend them as indoor pets though, they carry up to 100 infectious diseases. I have to say any killing I did was self defense. Here are some “fly facts” that I found online and of course feel compelled to share:
- House flies’ feet are 10 million times more sensitive to the taste of sugar than the human tongue
- Bush flies remain joined together for 80 minutes when mating
- Despite years of trying, no researcher has ever been able to teach flies anything – fish learn, ants learn, snails learn, cockroaches learn, even worms learn … but never flies
- A coffin fly can live for up to a year inside a sealed coffin – it can produce many generations who all happily feed off the dead body
Skin crawl- inducing stuff for sure. But we do have to remember this fact: Ecologists say that if all the humans were to suddenly vanish, the environment of Earth would improve, but if all the insects were to suddenly vanish, it would be a disaster.
(Note: to anyone who’s come across this article by Googling how to get rid of pests and you live in the country, I highly recommend NEVER using one of those foggers. Although you may get rid of the bugs initially, what you will succeed in doing is killing the good bugs as well as the bad, ie there are a lot of good bugs that eat the “bad†bugs. Bugs are an inevitable part of living in a place that’s not covered in concrete; for all the creepy-crawlies you see just outside your home there are probably thousands more you never see. Part of me wonders if that week-long fly problem had something to do with killing a nearby ant colony that may have kept them in check. If you have an infestation that’s putting yourself or your family in danger, I suggest an eco-friendly pest control professional.)
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