Storing Food

[sarafina]

Ok, that deal about roach eggs in the glue? Urban legend.

Stuck to the cardboard boxes, for sure, but easily inspected visually and removed if present.



Think a large peanut, or a chicklet of gum... these puppies are not flat, and would not be in the flat, machined seams of a box or bag.

Unfortunately you only have to miss one of these little bug bombs to be inundated. They hatch a mob of tiny roaches, like a spider sac.

Our answer living in the tropics in a house was the cat. He was an amazing roacher. I swept up tons of bugs from under the dining room table most mornings, but they were never full sized after the first month or so that he was big enough to hunt them. And after awhile we never saw any at all.

And boric acid and fossil flour in cracks crannies crevices and cupboards work well with out poisoning the environment that you live in.

[roverhi]

If you think cockroaches are offensive but harmless, our experience may change your mind.

We managed to keep our boat free of pests for more than a year of cruising in French Polynesia. When we provisioned in Papeete for our trip back to the States, we weren't very careful keeping boxes and paper bags off the boat. Didn't take bags or boxes with us on the passage but carried our goods back in them and left them on deck or below for a day or two before throwing them away. By the time we got to Hawaii, we were beginning to see signs of roaches. Not many but a very occasional little critter. We bounced around Hawaii for 6 months and weren't really all that bothered by the pests. They were there but we'd smack the ones we saw and managed to keep their numbers down. Our slip finally came up in the Ala Wai and we left the boat there unattended for 3 months or so and then a friend of a friend wanted to stay on the boat for a couple of days. When he opened the companionway, he said it was like Helter Skelter with cockroaches running every which way. He and his girl friend declared war on the bugs, killed a bunch of them, and thought they'd gotten the situation somewhat under control after a couple of hours. He said they had a big stack of squashed cockroaches to show us how bad the infestation was. So things were okay for them as the bugs were staying out of sight until that night.
whe they came back eating out, the bugs made another charge. Once again they swatted and squashed a ton of cockroaches and things appeared to be back under control so they went to sleep.

The guy slept on the stbd. settee which had a rack for my Sony shortwave radio mounted at the head of the berth. Sometime during the night, while he was sound asleep, a cockroach dropped into his mouth. He awoke startled and sat up spitting out the roach. Unfortunately, the radio rack hadn't moved and he nearly knocked himself out splitting open his forehead. A quick trip to emergency got his forehead sutured. They'd had it with the boat and rented a Hotel Room for the rest of their stay on Oahu.

We flew in a couple of days later and immediately set off bombs in the boat. That left the boat loaded with cockroach carcasses, hundreds of them. We cleaned up the bodies and moved back aboard. The cockroaches had done significant damage to the boat and gear. They'd eaten the glue on the spines on all of our books so the pages just fell out, the waterproofing on our foulweather gear, even the paint in some places. We ended up having to bomb the boat in 2 week intervals for about 2 months before we managed to kill all the roaches from the constantly hatching eggs. it was a major battle that only constant attention and diligence allowed us to win.

You do not want roaches to gain a foothold. They are villanous creatures that a bear to get rid of once they are established. They are also really destructive and will find something to eat no matter how careful you are.