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My 3 family building had roaches, but after several visits from an exterminator to all apts and an extensive renovation, they have been gone for years..not one left. It's near impossible to get rid of roaches in a building if you dont have access to all apts. It only takes 1 pig in a building to create a nonstop roach problem.
Roaches are everywhere. Tell you a tale & solution.
I moved into a new affordable "lottery" housing building in the Bronx 2 years ago and lived on the 13th floor. I honestly thought that I would be roach free forever, but was always conscious of two air vents I had in the apartment. First year was roach free, by the second year they begun to show up in bunches. It begun with one or two and then there was an infestation in my kitchen. Mind you, I was very clean. According to my super, the upstairs neighbors had an infestation that was out of this world. I eventually found the disgusting "queen" hidden inside a box in a cabinet and killed it along with the rest of its mischievous offspring. I laid out a home made solution because they kept visiting and it worked wonders on eliminating them.
Home made Solution: Buy boric acid, eggs and sugar. Boil the eggs but discard the whites and just use the yolk. Mix PLENTY boric acid and sugar(attracts them) with the egg yolk and create small little balls. Place these little balls strategically around your house(I also placed some hidden in the hallway and in the garbage chute area). The roaches will eat it and cover themselves with it and bring some back to their nest. Once they die the other roaches feast on the fallen soldier(those cannibals!) and eat the poison itself...it'll eventually reach the upper hierarchy and the kingdom shall fall. I was roach free!
most times the roaches were afraid to come into my kitchen - i had the boric acid, spray, the glue traps AND the stuff your use like caulk around the pipe openings but the ****ers still would come in the summer - you can kill every roach in your apt - but the guy upstairs/downstairs/on either side of you has 'em - so they just come back....
I'm going to miss roach free living - I'm in a house in Queens. We dont have any pests, sometimes we get a stray field mouse at the end of the summer - but i usually catch his butt and send him off. Im planning to move into a complex, and I dread the roach menace. I have gotten used to leaving fruit on the table, cat food bowl on the floor etc....
I am happy to say I DO NOT have roaches in my co-op! no one was more surprised than me. I did not think it possible to live in a dense dwelling and remain roach free, but in the 7 months I have been here I saw 2 "regular" sized roaches in the basement in the garbage bins. (2 at he same time, it was xmas eve and the garbage was not picked up)
And one crawled in under my door as I was getting ready to leave - he didnt make it far! - Those roaches appeared after the elevator modernization project , when the drilling went on for weeks, brought them up from out of the depths. I felt sorry for the people on the 1st & 2nd floors - but our exterminator is good, and I have yet to see a roach in my apt, and most of my neighbors claim the same roach free living. There are 7 apts per floor - 6 floors. Knock on wood, I have been very lucky. I guess it is possible. I also keep my unit very clean., and dont give them a reason to linger,
Things are better now roachwise. Yes, I rememer incidents of doing daiily battle against the unbeatable foe when all that was available were contact poisons that smelled awful and made me feel like I was the one being poisoned. And it was all for naught because some pig of a neighbor wouldn't allow an exterminator in so when his population gres crowded, they took short trips to nearby apartments.
I remember well taking off light switches and medicine chests so that I could pump POUNDS of boric acid into the walls. Every perimeter of every room, and closet, and sink and, cabinet had a line of white powder.
Now there are very effective paste BAIT poisons that can be smeared in inconspicuous place. These baits are irresistable to roaches without poisoning our air. They used to be available only to exterminators but now all the major insecticide manufaturers sell them to the public.
They are creams and come in tubes like toothpaste, but cost quite a bit more than the old spray cans. Just schmutz the stuff where you think roaches congregate...especially dark moist area like under sinks and in cabinets. The stuff is really a godsend.
I have been 18 months in this place and have never seen a bug in my apartment except for a couple flies. Nor has the place been exterminated in that time and alll I've put down is a little boric acid behind the tiles in the bathroom. <knocking woood> I'm ready with the bait creams, but they remain unopened.
A plus is that it seems nobody ever moves in or out.
Last edited by Kefir King; 04-28-2012 at 08:22 AM..
Now there are very effective paste BAIT poisons that can be smeared in inconspicuous place. These baits are irresistable to roaches without poisoning our air. They used to be available only to exterminators but now all the major insecticide manufaturers sell them to the public.
They are creams and come in tubes like toothpaste, but cost quite a bit more than the old spray cans. Just schmutz the stuff where you think roaches congregate...especially dark moist area like under sinks and in cabinets. The stuff is really a godsend.
I have been 18 months in this place and have never seen a bug in my apartment except for a couple flies. Nor has the place been exterminated in that time and alll I've put down is a little boric acid behind the tiles in the bathroom. <knocking woood> I'm ready with the bait creams, but they remain unopened.
A plus is that it seems nobody ever moves in or out.
What a godsend, indeed. That paste sounds great. Is there a brand you recommend?
They used the seriously toxic stuff back in my NY days, and with my brother and I both seriously, badly, horribly asthmatic, we had to stay a few days with relatives when the place was fumigated.
Here, we have the other apartments fumigated with the hypotoxic stuff every couple months, but not the one I sleep in. I won't take the chance. Even so, I only see a Palmetto bug when it rains a lot and they like to creep into the back storage room, and we put bait traps back there. Man those flying "roaches" nearly scared me to death when we first moved down here. All I kept thinking was, "Well, at least in the Bronx, they can't fly in into your face!"
What a godsend, indeed. That paste sounds great. Is there a brand you recommend?
I like COMABT Source Kill Max. It comes in 2.1 ounce syringes which is enought to treat a LOT of space. The one precaution is NOT to use it over an area recently sprayed with insecticide becasue the biugs are smart enough to avoid these areas.
Retreat every 3 months (or when all the stuff is eaten! )
Too bad for many New Yorkers that bedbugs don't eat anything but BLOOD!
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