3 Tips for Preventing Cockroaches in Your Home

There are a lot of cockroaches in the world, a few thousand species to be exact. Where do you think most of them live?

If you said urban centers or human dwellings, you’d be wrong. There are roughly 30 species that are household pests. Percentage-wise, that works out to less than one percent!

Unfortunately, those 30 species can cause a lot of trouble, and they leave many people worried about preventing cockroaches. The good news is that there are a few effective steps to take that can help prevent cockroach infestations.

We’ll talk more about them in this article, so keep reading.

1. Seal the Entrances

Cockroaches are notorious for squeezing into small spaces. In fact, they seem to enjoy tighter spaces. This may be for the purpose of avoiding predators.

Roaches commonly seek shelter in homes during the latter half of the year. Like all insects, roaches are cold-blooded, so they can’t regulate their body temperature.

Thus, their survival depends upon finding cooler shelters during the summer and warmer ones during the fall and winter. In most cases, the best option is a nearby house or apartment building.

2. Clean Up Food and Food Crumbs

Roaches evolved to be scavengers, eating food and materials left behind by other animals. In most cases, this is harmless and even beneficial. It helps with decomposition and it also helps to keep the world clean.

In human dwellings, it just causes them to eat all your food.

This means that preventing cockroaches involves getting rid of any extra food in your home, especially in the form of crumbs and other garbage. You can do this by putting your leftovers in the garbage.

If you want to keep your leftovers for later, may sure to put them in something with a lid. Keep in mind that roaches have a much broader definition of ‘food’ than we do.

From paper to mold, rotting wood, and even glue, a roach will eat them all. They’ll also use paper and wood as building materials for their nests.

3. Look for Nests

If you already have a cockroach problem, you’ll need to find out where they are. Roaches are social creatures and often live in nests. In fact, if a cockroach spends too much time alone, its health can suffer.

One of the surefire roach infestation signs is a strange smell. Roaches give off a strange, oily smell, and if you can smell it in your house, it means you have a sizeable roach problem.

It’s not hard to identify a cockroach nest. It will often contain eggs, larvae, and dead roaches. There will also be a lot of tiny black stains on the wall nearby. These stains are from roach droppings.

Preventing Cockroaches: Your Complete Guide

Preventing cockroaches can seem difficult, but there are definitely steps you can take. The key is to get rid of things they need to live in your home.

We’ve talked about a few such methods in this article. We hope that the bad reputation roaches have gotten for infesting homes hasn’t colored your opinion of them. Most of them are actually quite helpful to the world — just not your home.

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