Nobody likes cockroaches, they are nasty little buggers, and they can be so difficult to get rid of for anyone unsure how to deal with them properly. Countries like the United States and Australia tend to get the worst, but many hotter climates are not safe from the waves of cockroaches that appear each year.
If you notice cockroaches or cockroach eggs in your home, it can be a stressful time, and when you look to call an exterminator or a pest control service, their prices are likely to stress you even more. This is where we can help.
In this article, we will look to provide you with some helpful tips on how to best rid your home of cockroach eggs without the need for expensive services. We will also tell you how the eggs work, why destroying them is a bad idea, and how to keep them away for good.
Table of Contents
Cockroaches: A Quick Guide
There are four main cockroaches that people will find in their homes, American, the Oriental, the German, and the Brown-Banded. They are known for being dirty and spreading disease and often live in humid and damp locations like in pipes, trash cans, or sewers. Food poisoning is the most common health issue that cockroaches are known to spread, and their faeces can cause irritation and sickness in humans too. This is why getting rid of them from your home is so important, because if they are present, it greatly increases your chances of getting sick.
To kill the bugs themselves, there are a few key ways of doing it safely. However, you should not kill it with toxic chemicals, especially if you have pets and children, and kill it through smashing it, because if you crush a cockroach, it will release all of its eggs, and you are only increasing your problem. The best ways to kill it are with traps or repellents. Boric acid and peppermint oil are the two most common products used, but people will also use cucumber peel or citrus-like peels and rinds.
Taking Action
Say what you like about them, but cockroaches are survivors. For hundreds of millions of years, they have found ways to keep themselves alive and adapt to circumstances. When looking to get rid of cockroaches once and for all, beit the eggs and the insects themselves, there are a few important preventative measures that can be utilised.
Keep Food Storage Airtight
When it comes to stopping the growth of a cockroach, a simple plastic clip or folded bag will not be enough. Cockroaches feed off of things like cereals, sugar, flour, or crackers, to name but a few things, and if there is any water or dampness in your food, eliminating that is crucial too. The best solution is to have airtight containers because they will not let any water or insects in.
Keep it Clean
If there is one thing that cockroaches love, it is mess! If an area is messy, it likely to have dark and damp spots and this is where roaches thrive. If your house is a little messy and you happen to step on a roach, make sure to clean it and destroy the egg. And flush the dead roach down the drain because live cockroaches can feed off its corpse if thrown into the bin.
Remove all Doubt
If you have a drain cover or a plughole, use it as much as you can. If areas are covered, roaches can not enter. Similarly, using caulk to fill any holes around damp areas like a sink or a bathtub or toilet will help prevent the roaches from moving as much.
Cockroach Eggs: The Truth
Most people assume that roach eggs are so small and cannot be seen with the naked eye, but this is a myth. In fact, cockroach eggs are quite large and can have a hard outer shell. Eggs can be anywhere from 5-15mm, and they are typically dark in colour. Each of the four different roach types have different eggs, and each egg can carry anywhere from 16-60 babies in it.
Typically, eggs will be located in corners or in damper locations because the moisture allows for growth. Female cockroaches lay eggs every 6-8 weeks and each egg takes up to a month to hatch. American roaches have the most chance of laying eggs and can live for up to 4 years if conditions allow for it.
Female cockroaches also like to deposit their eggs near pieces of food since the baby cockroaches have to find their food when they hatch. Sometimes, the eggs will even hatch while being carried by the female roaches.
Killing the Eggs
Seeing as cockroaches can reproduce so quickly, killing their eggs efficiently is a crucial part of the extermination process. An ootheca (the name of the egg carrying all of the babies) can hatch into 50 new roaches if it is not dealt with properly and killing one roach only to have 50 more hatch will not solve anything. Many of the methods above and the typical roach traps will not kill the eggs, they may kill the roach carrying the eggs, but the ootheca can still survive.
One popular method of killing eggs is the classic roach bait. The beauty of this is that the roach will eat it and spread it around to the other roaches who will die of the same poisoning. The importance of the babies being neat food is also important because when the babies hatch and the first thing they eat is the bait, that will get rid of the problem quickly.
Similarly, you can just crush the eggs with a shoe. This method may be satisfying, but in terms of killing larger portions of the cockroach colony, it is not as effective. Too many people will kill a roach with a shoe and then do nothing about the ootheca left behind. You don’t need a hammer to get rid of the problem, but give it a good stamp if you use a shoe.
As mentioned earlier, try to avoid using toxic chemicals to spray roaches because that will be dangerous for young children or animals, and in general, look to avoid sprays overall. Sprays may well kill the one roach, but they are not effective in mass extermination and are unlikely to kill any eggs too.