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Have you ever tried to kill roaches with insecticides? It must have been hard since they always seem to survive and get the population back in a few months.
This is because roaches can create immunities to most pesticides, so they won’t die when you spray them.
Sometimes the best way to get rid of roaches is to trap them and get them out of your house or kill them after a while. For this, there are several options for roach traps, and you might be skeptical about it.
Let us get into the details and see how effective these traps are and if they’ll help you stop roaches;
Do Roach Traps Work?
Yes, roach traps work, and most of them are more effective than other methods of cockroach elimination. When you spray them, the roaches could hide and wait it out, but the trap will stay out, and when the roaches come out to feed, they will get trapped or poisoned, and you can get rid of them faster.
Good Options For Roach Traps
In general, traps work, but their effectiveness will depend on the brand you choose and where you use them.
There are many choices for roach traps and baits, so you might need to know about a few that will work well to make selection easier for you.
1. MaxForce FC Roach Bait
MaxForce roach stations are a premier choice for most people since they are flexible in use, and their design makes them safe to use even in houses with kids. Each station is a capsule with poisoned bait that will kill the roaches soon after eating it.
MaxForce contains an active ingredient, Fipronil, that is very fast-acting, but the roaches have to ingest it for it to work.
When using this product, you should strive for between 4 and 6 stations per 100 square foot surface area.
Make sure you place the stations in places with roach activity. Also, make sure you don’t apply any other insecticides in the area since they will contaminate the bait and deter roaches from the trap, and you will be less likely to get a catch.
It would be best if you replaced the stations about every 45 to 60 days, but you can expect control in a matter of 7 or 10 days.
If you have a heavy infestation, it might take up to three weeks. It is important to make sure that your hands are clean when you set it up.
Dirty hands will contaminate the station and mess with its scent; therefore, the roaches might go to feed on it.
Take out the station and pull off the back cover to expose the adhesive, then think about where the roaches can be.
Behind the cabinet or under the fridge, for instance, will have a lot of activity; thus, you can put the stations there.
Place the bait on a flat vertical surface or a counter or floor facing upwards. Avid putting it upside down since roaches don’t like to feed that way.
Other places to consider are closets, inside drawers, underneath sinks, and other dark places. When placing the stations, avoid cleaning products like detergents since they have strong fumes that will contaminate the bait, and it won’t work the way you need it to.
MaxForce bait stations are a popular choice because of how easy and safe to use they are. You can place them in areas that children can’t get to so they don’t hurt themselves. It will also not mess with your décor as you can put it inside drawers or cabinets.
2. Combat Roach Baits
This product combines expertise in formulation with knowledge of insect habits to create high-performance insect elimination products. One of the top-performing products is the bait station design that most people use.
If you open up the bait station, you will find the bait in the middle, and when the lid is on, it creates a dark, tight environment.
Roaches like to crawl into small dark nooks in your home, so the station’s design helps lure them into the trap where they get the bait.
Formulation experts have created a unique combination that is sweet to the insect. It needs to be tasty so that the insects choose it over the crumbs scattered all over your kitchen.
So the bait has to be sweet enough, so the insect goes to the bait rather than other food sources in your home.
The insect will grab the bait and carry it back to the nest to feed. It isn’t only that roach that feeds on the bait, several other roaches in the colony will feed on the bait, and the poison in the bait will kill them.
Roaches prefer to feed in the protection of the nest rather than going out to look for food, so they will feed on the roaches that the original bait killed.
These carcasses will also have the active ingredient, so when the other roaches eat the bodies, they also die from the poison.
Eventually, you will have a repetitive killing effect that will wipe out the nest and solve your roach product.
DIY Cockroach Traps
You can buy bait and place it around the house to help you get rid of cockroaches, but roaches are highly adaptive, so there is a high chance that they will adapt and survive the bait. Even if they die, it might be hard for you to find the dead roaches and clean their bodies.
At some point, it is easier to trap the bugs and get rid of them without looking for them. There are products on the market that do this using electricity, but you can be creative about it and make your own. Here are some ideas you can try;
1. Double-sided tape
Roaches are small and aren’t that strong, so it is easy to trap them. You can find a big piece of double-sided tape and place it on the floor or a wall that roaches frequently use. Put something like tomato sauce or sugar at the center of it and leave it for some time.
The bait will attract the roaches, and when they step onto the tape, the adhesive will hold onto their legs, effectively trapping them. After a day, you can come back to take the tape off and dispose of it together with the roaches.
This simple plan will work well for German cockroaches that are common in houses since they are small and powerless.
You will need to put up a new tape after a few days since the adhesive might wear out and lose its effectiveness.
2. Glass Jar on a plate
This simple plan might not cost you anything if you have the jar from used jelly or peanut butter in your house. For this trap to work best, you need to make sure it is glass or an extra slippery plastic bottle.
Place the jar on a flat plate or tray and leave it open, then put it in a place where roaches visit often. Add some bait in the jar and clean the rest of the area to make the trap more enticing and force the roaches to go to it.
The idea is the shape of the glass jar makes it easy for roaches to climb into it. You can leave the sticker on to make it even easier, and the shape allows a roach to make it into the jar easily. Once it falls in, the shape is inverted.
The roach will have to climb upside down on a slippery surface to get out of the jar, which will be impossible for them.
You will come in the morning to find several roaches trapped in the jar, and you can take them out and kill them or feed them to birds.
3. Inverted bottle top trap
This involves cutting the top funnel-shaped part of a large bottle, preferably 1 liter or two, then fitting it back in like a funnel.
Take the bottle top off and squeeze the top in to ensure there aren’t any spaces on the sides for the roaches to escape.
You then need to prepare bait; you can use a cup of water with a sweetener like sugar; make sure you dissolve all the sugar, then pour it into the container. Make sure the funnel has the sugar’s aroma to attract the insects.
Secure the top, then take the trap to a location with many roaches. The roaches will go in to feed, but they will fall into the sugar solution and drown. If they try to get t=out, the funnel design will make it impossible, and they will fall back in.
Conclusion
Roach traps are an effective way to manage roach populations in your house, and the right products will work better than standard pesticides. Good bait will poison the colony and wipe out your problem in weeks.
You can get roach traps from the store or make your own from what you have in your house. Get a method that will work depending on the infestation on your hands.
