Cockroaches - What Do You Do ?

[zeehag]

leaving out cups with coffee doesnt catch any--but the mocha i love does----trap and make swim. this is along with the borax sold here in mexico a s roach powder-

yes, BORAX

and heavy dooty sprays that can be sprayed in tightly closed areas to keep them out of the places you wish em to remain out of as you destroy them -- in your mind.

they were made durable for a reason....dangit.


oh, yes--as you remove ALL paper stuffs from cans and eggs and bottles and everything, make sure there are no areas anywhere for the eggs to stay--rodlmao--is a never ending job, and requires a few lifetimes for complete removal of these dambugs.....

as long as you are monitoring paper stuff, might as well add paper towels and toilet paper to the mix, after all, there is cardboard used there as a roller...lol will hide lots of eggs in that cardboard. paper for list making also is subject to infestation. bananas, fruits, veggies, everything....

.will you be able to load groceries into your boat from a dinghy at anchor with 20 kt winds and 3 ft chop messing with your balance--can you empty the bags of groceries and check for eggies at same time while fending off the hull of your boat while keeping it close and maintaining balance , or will you merely dump the new stuff into cockpit of your boat to sort.....lol
is a neverending battle. kinda like all the useless wars played out with humans on our earth....

a friend suggested the zen method of dealing with these bugs, but i am not into that passive let em run the boat ideology.
i used to have 2 gekkos on board..until bubba caught and ate them....and some spideys, but those died when i sprayed the good poison and killed off EVERYTHING!!!! except the freeking roaches....rodlmao

sacrificial foods in a container to catch em does work, they will die in the water ..
kill babies with spray and the adults with other methods as the eggs are laid as they die--and you will never find them..

btw----sailing in tropics, you WILL get roaches as they do FLY toward lights as you read or watch your television or play online in darkness.....

ditb--you never heard of chocolate covered bugs fro human enjoyment?? there were ants, grasshoppers, et cetera----is from where that comes, i would think, as the source of the sentence is my age, and has an excellent memory .... for an old pharte....LOL....and a helluva sense of humor.

[rivonia]

What ever you do DO NOT USE KEROSENE if you want to wash the surfaces clean use a very basic simple product such DETOL

[Rakuflames]

Originally Posted by SaltyMonkey

I've used - bombs, boric acid, sterilizing bait trays (so they cant breed) poison traps.

Bombs worked the best. Followed by sterilization. But even these can be amune to some varieties. Never had much luck with boric acid, but I will try sometime the mix method.

Thai cockroaches are the worse I heard!

Agree about killing source of food.

Disagree about eggs and cardboard. Cardboard not only carries cockroaches in cracks, but they DO carry eggs inside. I've seen this many many times.

Cardboard boxes do NOT come on my boats. Moreover, I also take effort to dip produce in bleach solution, and remove labels on all cans etc. For other bugs and varmits

You have to be really creative and "think like a bug." I have a friend who couldn't seem to get rid of them and they were hiding in places he just hadn't thought of, such as zipper plackets in the canvas work, and electrical outlets.

[charliehows]

i tried barry manilow cds - almost killed me, i'd rather share the place with the roaches - commercial aerosol surface spray works for me, havent seen a roach for months - but also must be coupled with clean food habits

[rebel heart]

We've never seen a roach onboard (did have rat last year though).

I've been putting roach baits down since we first took ownership of the boat. Maybe a dozen of them sprinkled all about. I add new ones every year or so.

[Bruce626]

Originally Posted by DITB

The only pets we have on board is a few (?) cockroaches and those creeps too small to see (or too good at hiding).

I want something high tech, like a night vision scanner with sync'ed lasers that roasts them in their tracks! Maybe not so effective but much more exiting!

Then I will rename them cockroast and feed them to the fishes!

OK - One can recycle an old microwave oven into a pest and weed exterminating device. Take the microwave oven apart and keep the magnetron, power supply, fan, light, and on/off switch. Using the sheet metal from the oven or a galvanized stove pipe, mount the magnetron at the front with the microwave emitter centered and pointed out – it should be set back from the end about six inches or so to shroud the beam. Use the same holes that bolt the magnetron to the inside of the pipe to affix the forward hand grip – probably made from wood. Mount the fan in back of the magnetron so that it will blow air over the power supply which is mounted at the back. Use the bolts that secure the power supply to mount the rear hand grip – this hand grip is hollow and the power cord* runs out of the handle to plug into an extension cord. The hand grip also mounts the trigger type on/off switch which will only stay on while it is being held back with the trigger finger. Mount the oven light** over the power supply and change to a red bulb if possible (to let the user know the unit is on, and to protect night vision). Use some metal screening material, perhaps that found in the oven door, to screen the rear opening of the pipe. As an option, one might affix an old laser pointer** to the top of the magnetron, run by the power supply, to show where the invisible microwave beam is being directed.
* For portable use – perhaps on a boat – one could power the unit for a limited amount of time using a small twelve volt motorcycle battery and an appropriately sized inverter.
** To save power and up the visibility, dispense with the small oven light and instead of a laser pointer, use an array of four write heads from an old recycled CD/DVD burner. Cheap but powerful, this would outline the invisible microwave beam with four red dots. Note that the laser array is likely powerful enough to cause temporary blindness if directed into someone’s eyes. The trigger could be wired so that as the trigger is pulled back the laser array comes on, continue pulling and the microwave beam comes on.

When on, the magnetron will emit a compact stream of microwave energy – this should be tested by aiming the device at a small glass of water. One should be able to get a feel for the direction and range of the microwave beam by noting how long it takes the water to boil. In general, microwave energy is not good for living things as it excites the water found therein which heats the item up. An insect, perhaps a cockroach, is a small quantity of mostly water contained in a chitin shell – and this small quantity of water can be rapidly heated to over the temperature at which insects die (around 105 F). A similar thing happens to the leaves of plants (weeds). Microwaves will go through some stuff like plastic, wood, concrete, and earth (like ground penetrating radar does) so for safety you should know what is on the other side of walls – and this feature might be used to kill pests inside the walls (cockroaches, mice, etc). Some experimentation will be needed to determine the range and penetration of your unit. Microwaves do NOT penetrate metal, so any metal surface in the beam will act like a mirror and reflect the microwave beam – if the surface is flat the beam will be reflected at an angle (the angle of reflection is equal to the angle of incidence), if the surface is convex the beam will be dissipated, but if the surface is concave the beam may become concentrated (at least for some distance). Some prudence is indicated here.

[Teknav]

The cockroach's song...

La cucaracha, la cucaracha,
ya no puede caminar
porque le falta, porque no tiene
marihuana pa' fumar.

Ya murió la cucaracha
ya la llevan a enterrar
entre cuatro zopilotes
y un ratón de sacristán.

[Rakuflames]

Originally Posted by Teknav

The cockroach's song...

La cucaracha, la cucaracha,
ya no puede caminar
porque le falta, porque no tiene
marihuana pa' fumar.

Ya murió la cucaracha
ya la llevan a enterrar
entre cuatro zopilotes
y un ratón de sacristán.

La pobre cucaracha no consigue ningún respeto!

[Tantalus]

What Zeehag said...Borax!
From a book I used to have called "Tiny Game Hunting"' mix Borax with a sweetened drink mix, such as Koolaid, put it at various places around the boat.

Be carefull if you have small pets, but it's harmless to humans.

Happy hunting!

[hellosailor]

"Never had much luck with boric acid, "
That's a common misperception. Unlike other chemicals, roaches and bugs cannot develop any immunity to boric acid because it works physically, just like tiny bits of jagged broken glass. The boric acid crystals are much harder than roach chitin (shell) and they are very sharp when fresh and dry. They also have an electrostatic charge that makes them cling to bugs.
So what happens is that the tiny bits of "broken glass" cling to any roaches that contact them, and get taken back to the nest when the bug goes home--where you can't see it. Then the crystals punch holes in the chitin and the roaches literally bleed out, they dessicate and die the "death of a thousand cuts".
There is no immunity to this and as long as some crystals remain sharp and dry, they continue to kill other bugs in the nest.

But you won't think it is working, because you will never see dead bugs. The nest is out of sight, and the bugs still in the nest are busy eating the dead ones as well. Which spreads the boric acid and kills more of them.

It is not fast, it is not visible, and as the powder ages and gets wet or worn it is less effective. But it does work. And recommended not to place where you may inhale it, because it does the same thing in human lungs.

Now, if you want fast visible results, use the RAID Combat brand smoke bombs. Not spray, but smoke bombs (blue and yellow box) that are inverted in water and give off a dry smoke. That penetrates everything, and kills in minutes. Offhand I think you are supposed to leave things sealed up for 4 hours, then ventilate for more hours. No residue left behind and the active agent is supposed to be harmless to mammals.

But as I've said before, most folks make the mistake of not understanding how roaches breed. 30 days from hatching to maturity, 30 days for eggs to hatch, 30 days for a new breed. So you need to bomb or kill 3x over 90 days in order to get rid of the ones that are still safely in their eggs, just emerging from their eggs, and then about to lay a new cluster of eggs. Killing roaches "just once" won't break the 90-day cycle, you've got to kill three times to get rid of them just once.

Learned from an entymologist, who actually raised them in aquarium tanks on blocks of DDT to study their immunity and how to break it.

[capttman]

Cockroaches lay eggs as they die so you should bomb your boat with an over the counter bug bomb and then do it 7 days later then 7 days later again and presto they are gone
Good luck. Only had the problem once on a dock an old timer taught me the triple check

[skipmac]

Originally Posted by hellosailor

"Never had much luck with boric acid, "
That's a common misperception. Unlike other chemicals, roaches and bugs cannot develop any immunity to boric acid because it works physically, just like tiny bits of jagged broken glass. The boric acid crystals are much harder than roach chitin (shell) and they are very sharp when fresh and dry. They also have an electrostatic charge that makes them cling to bugs.
So what happens is that the tiny bits of "broken glass" cling to any roaches that contact them, and get taken back to the nest when the bug goes home--where you can't see it. Then the crystals punch holes in the chitin and the roaches literally bleed out, they dessicate and die the "death of a thousand cuts".
There is no immunity to this and as long as some crystals remain sharp and dry, they continue to kill other bugs in the nest.

But you won't think it is working, because you will never see dead bugs. The nest is out of sight, and the bugs still in the nest are busy eating the dead ones as well. Which spreads the boric acid and kills more of them.

It is not fast, it is not visible, and as the powder ages and gets wet or worn it is less effective. But it does work. And recommended not to place where you may inhale it, because it does the same thing in human lungs.

Now, if you want fast visible results, use the RAID Combat brand smoke bombs. Not spray, but smoke bombs (blue and yellow box) that are inverted in water and give off a dry smoke. That penetrates everything, and kills in minutes. Offhand I think you are supposed to leave things sealed up for 4 hours, then ventilate for more hours. No residue left behind and the active agent is supposed to be harmless to mammals.

But as I've said before, most folks make the mistake of not understanding how roaches breed. 30 days from hatching to maturity, 30 days for eggs to hatch, 30 days for a new breed. So you need to bomb or kill 3x over 90 days in order to get rid of the ones that are still safely in their eggs, just emerging from their eggs, and then about to lay a new cluster of eggs. Killing roaches "just once" won't break the 90-day cycle, you've got to kill three times to get rid of them just once.

Learned from an entymologist, who actually raised them in aquarium tanks on blocks of DDT to study their immunity and how to break it.

I wasn't able to consult an entomologist but what you report confirms my experience with roaches and boric acid.

My last boat after a couple of years cruising I had managed to collect roaches from all over FL and the northern Caribbean. I suspected they were hanging out in the hidden places in my boat cross-breeding into a species of super roach. Not sure if they managed to breed super-roach but they were certainly prolific.

Got back to FL, cleaned all the food, cardboard and such off the boat, dumped boric acid everywhere, locked it up and left for 3-4 months. Came back and there were NO roaches. Zero.

Another nice thing about using boric acid, you aren't dumping toxic chemicals in your living space.

[hellosailor]

Superroaches: Ever wonder just where they go to get those itty bitty capes and uniforms made up? Or what kind of slob Jorel was, to send his baby son across the universe in a bug-infested spaceship??

Now you're going to be up all night worrying about these things.<G>

[Celestialsailor]

I had an infestation with a house I had in Hawaii. When I bought it, it was clean. I rented it out for a few years and ...Oh my gawd!!! I can't believe how people can live like this. They had tore out all the screen to jimmy windows, why I don't know. Then due to humidity, the windows left open to the bug public. When I took the house back, I bombed every 10 days. The 1st time, picked up 70+ corpses. 2nd, 30. 3rd, about 10 bodies. I continued every 10 days for another month and finally they were gone. Then the clean up. Scrapping off dead and old eggs from under the sink. Dismantling the stove and finding the same. Washing all the carpets, walls and painting. After that it was a routing bombing every 6 months to see what falls out of the cracks.

[Rakuflames]

Originally Posted by Celestialsailor

I had an infestation with a house I had in Hawaii. When I bought it, it was clean. I rented it out for a few years and ...Oh my gawd!!! I can't believe how people can live like this. They had tore out all the screen to jimmy windows, why I don't know. Then due to humidity, the windows left open to the bug public. When I took the house back, I bombed every 10 days. The 1st time, picked up 70+ corpses. 2nd, 30. 3rd, about 10 bodies. I continued every 10 days for another month and finally they were gone. Then the clean up. Scrapping off dead and old eggs from under the sink. Dismantling the stove and finding the same. Washing all the carpets, walls and painting. After that it was a routing bombing every 6 months to see what falls out of the cracks.

The jimmied windows could have been teens sneaking back into the house after a night out ...