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Roaches are possibly one of the most annoying insects you could have infesting your house, especially if you try your best to keep it tidy.
Roaches are incredibly resilient, and they can create immunities to pesticides rather easily, making them hard to get rid of.
You can put up all the precautions and still end up with roaches in your house, which can be frustrating.
To understand where the roaches might come from, let us get into the details and see how they move and potentially how someone can transfer them to your house;
Can Someone Bring Roaches To Your House?
Yes, someone can transfer roaches to your house if they have a colony in theirs. They can come in with live roaches if they have many bags or but most likely; they will bring in eggs through their bags, shoes, and other things with spaces in them.
These eggs will hatch in about 35 days, and you will have a problem on your hands.
How To Tell If Someone Can Bring Roaches
Roaches are bad, and you are correct to be scared of them and do everything you can to keep them out of your house, but you can’t harass your friends because of it.
The good thing is that they will often hide when humans are around, so you have time to see if they are present.
When your friends bring you gifts or potential roach careers, you need the right way to know if they are potential problems or not.
Some signs will help you know an item has roaches, so let us look at them to help you know what to keep.
Roach droppings
When you get boxes, bags, purses, or anything else that can hold many cloths, check it for small brown droppings that might have smeared it, you could find them in dark pockets or crevices the owner rarely uses.
If there are roach droppings, there is a significant chance that the bag has roaches or eggs. You, therefore, need to take it away from other items in your house, clean it and treat it with an insect growth regulator before moving it into your storage space.
A musky scent
Roaches produce a lot of pheromones, and it can be easy to pick up their scent, especially if there are several adult roaches in one place.
When you get a box with a musky scent, treat it as infested and take it aside for treatment before taking it into your house.
If possible, get rid of the box and keep only its contents. Don’t take in potential roach or egg carriers if you have the option to get rid of them.
Broken legs or wings
When going through clothes, you might find some legs or wings, which indicate an infestation. The legs could have come off when someone moved the items, but there is a decent chance there are still roaches in the bag.
Roach exoskeletons
Roaches have an external skeleton, so as their body size increases, they must take it off and grow a new one. This means they will leave shells of their exoskeleton in places they have lived for a long time.
Exoskeletons in a bag mean that roaches could potentially be ready to reproduce, so you should be alarmed.
Take the whole bag out and treat it with pesticides and IGR, so the life cycle breaks and all the roaches die, then you can bring it back into your home.
How To Avoid Bringing Roaches To Your House
Ever heard the saying, prevention is better than cure? A cockroach infestation is the best example of this saying and its meaning.
It is relatively easy to keep roaches out of your house, but once they get in, you have a problem that is near impossible to deal with.
You need to take all necessary precautions to ensure you don’t carry roaches from a neighbor’s or friend’s house to yours. Here are some tips you will find helpful to keep you safe from a cockroach infestation.
When you visit a friend, don’t leave your belongings lying in a place where roaches can get to it and crawl in.
Leave it on a high table or a place with a lot of light since roaches generally avoid such places where you can spot them.
If you have to sit, sit in a clean, open place like a dining room or patio with open furniture that doesn’t have space for roaches to hide.
Avoid garages, closets, or kitchens since they are the prime breeding grounds for most roaches, and you could easily pick up a few eggs or roaches.
This may sound like bad advice, but you should avoid helping people with spring cleaning since it involves poking around places that the roaches frequent.
As you move couches and other homes for colonies, you increase the chances of bringing roaches with you when you go back home.
When you get home after visiting someone, especially for several days, make sure you clean all the clothes and bags immediately, so the roaches don’t get the chance to get out of them. This will remove the eggs and kill the adult roaches, so you don’t have an infestation.
If you have friends over, you need to take precautions to help keep roaches out. For starters, ask them if they have a roach infestation in their home and if they do, prepare to treat your house to avoid the infestation.
You can ask them to leave high-risk items like coats or bags in the car or outside to ensure eggs don’t drop in your house.
Always take your trash out and keep all surfaces in your house clean, and you will not have a roach problem.
Another source is sharing equipment like lawnmowers with neighbors; roaches hide nearly everywhere, including electronics, so you might get the problem from a neighbor when they bring back something they borrowed from you.
How To Prevent Outdoor Roach Invasions
Outdoor roaches like the American roach are not shy about invading your indoor living spaces. If you have food, water, and shelter, they will infest your house and make your life hell. They are as bad as their indoor relatives, so you might want to do your best to keep them out.
Outdoor roaches like the brown bandit or American roach tend to be larger than indoor roaches, with American roaches going as big as 1.5 inches.
Indoor roaches are about half an inch, and you will mostly find them indoors clustered around heat sources like appliances.
Indoor roaches like German cockroaches and outdoor roaches like American roaches will need different treatment methods and products to control. This means you need the correct identification to know what products to use on them.
Outdoor roaches can find their way into attics, garages, bathrooms, kitchens, and the basement. When inspecting outdoor roaches, note any possible entry points like cracks or open doors and windows.
You need to examine the doors and window sills to ensure they close correctly. You should also inspect the interior for any crevices or cracks that roaches could crawl through. You will treat these areas to ensure roaches don’t get into your house.
To manage an outdoor roach infestation, first use an insecticide and mix it with an insect growth regulator.
The insecticide will kill both the young and adult roaches, while the growth regulator will break the life cycle to prevent survivors from getting to maturity and hatching.
Apply the pesticide and IGR solution as a perimeter treatment around your structure’s foundation.
Create a border by spraying 3 feet on the structure and the ground below it. Afterward, treat the entry points you noted in your inspection.
Be sure to spray around doors, windows, utility pipe openings, and any other openings you may have found.
When an adult roach comes into contact with the solution, it will take up to an hour to die, but premature ones will take longer as the IGR inhibits its growth.
After spraying, lay out an insecticide bait to kill any roaches that survive the insecticides. Apply the bait around shrubs, bushes, and trees since that is where most outdoor roaches live. Apply more bait close to any entry points you had noted during your inspection.
If the roaches get past the barrier, you can use a duster to apply the bait in tight places like crevices outside your house.
Roaches are hard to kill, so it is important to have several prevention lines to increase the chances of wiping them out.
Conclusion
Roaches are a problem for most people since they are so adaptable and hard to kill with normal pest control methods.
Once you have a colony in your house, it will take several weeks of different pesticides, and after that, you might not even get rid of the problem.
It is better to find ways to prevent roaches from getting into your house. Seal any cracks on your wall and spray the outside with insecticides, so outdoor roaches don’t come in. Take precautions when you have friends over since they can bring roaches.
