As the temperatures rise and the days become longer in upstate New York, indoor insect pest sightings will also increase. Many common nuisance insect pests in the state become most problematic within homes during the late summer and fall seasons when falling temperatures prompt some insects to move indoors for the winter. These insect pests include Asian lady beetles, boxelder bugs, and western conifer seed bugs. However, the summer heat can bring many ant and fly pest species indoors, including carpenter ants, pavement ants, cluster flies and fruit flies. Then there’s the arthropod pests that are experts at maintaining a year round presence indoors. These arthropod pests include insects like cockroaches, bed bugs and termites, as well as arachnids like daddy long-legs and house spiders. The house centipede, which is technically a chilopod, is also notorious for maintaining a year round presence within homes in upstate New York. While all of these arthropod pests are universally unwanted within homes, there does not exist one single method that can reliably eliminate each one of the above-named pests from homes. In fact, common over-the-counter pest control products, like Raid and total-release home foggers (bug bombs), are completely ineffective at eradicating infestations.
Store-bought insecticide sprays may be effective at killing unwanted indoor insect pests when they are spotted out in the open, but these products cannot address household infestations. So spraying store-bought insecticides around door-frames and window-frames will not provide lasting protection from insect pests. The best thing a homeowner can do to prevent insect pests from entering a home is to apply sealant to foundation cracks and other structural imperfections that allow insect pests access indoors. Arthropods like centipedes, millipedes, carpenter ants, termites, cockroaches and sow bugs infest areas of a home where moisture-levels are unusually high. No amount of bug bombs or insecticides are going to keep these insects from returning to a home unless the moisture source is eliminated. Pest control professionals are trained to pinpoint high-moisture areas before making use of any sort of insecticide, as merely eliminating a source of high-moisture, such as a pipe-leak, is often enough to eliminate a pest infestation. One recent study conducted at North Carolina State University found that German cockroach populations within homes did not decrease one single bit after 30 consecutive days of fogging, or “bug bombing.” The best foggers can do is to temporarily decrease insect pest numbers within homes, but even this is expecting a lot. These days, pest control professionals do not rely solely on chemicals for insect pest eradication and infestation prevention; instead, pest controllers now rely on more practical methods for eliminating indoor pests.
Have you ever used an insect pest fogger, or “bug bomb”?
