Almost everyday is an adventure for a pest control technician. With each stop of the day the chances are they’ll see something outrageously funny, strange, amazing, peculiar or positively gross and then it’s off to the next client to see what that will bring. You never know really when and where you’ll be treated to such things and for the most part it is the accounts that you wouldn’t expect at all. People are so diverse and lifestyles may be at polar opposites even for next door neighbors.
When it comes to roaches people have a wide variety of tolerances and depending on when that threshold is crossed is when they’ll finally call in a pro for help. It’s amazing to me the infestation levels I see and I often wonder how people could let a problem go so long or did the pest population just sneak up on them and then seemingly explode overnight? German roach jobs can be a nightmare in homes or restaurants once a certain level is reached. Certainly you’ll kill a zillion of them but there will always be a number of them that survive and your follow up treatments have to be just as intense as the initial clean out or you’ll never get the population down to zero.
People worry about roaches building up immunity to chemicals and indeed that does happen. This takes time however and is not nearly the problem that it is given credit for. What does happen though is that certain roaches in the home are not as susceptible to a product you are using and therefore survive. Their offspring in turn pick up this trait passed along by the parents. They too are less likely to die and so you have strains of roaches that seem to be immune. An example of this might be; I have no ill effects from poison ivy, I can touch it or walk through it in the woods and very rarely have any symptoms. This trait is passed along in my children and they too are less affected than others if they come in contact. Now send me through poison Sumach and I may swell up like a balloon. For german roaches it’s always best to use more than one product and more than one class of pesticide and avoid leaving strains of resistant roaches behind.
It’s tempting to believe the packaging of the pest control products we find on the store shelves. They claim long term residuals or the bait goes back to the nest and all will die but in reality these products are almost always rendered useless because of the one thing the
packaging can’t give you. Knowledge is the key ingredient in any endeavor and especially in pest control treatments. Proper selection of a chemical coupled with best placements is the main difference between the do it yourself home owner and the pest control professional. For the chemical companies it’s a win win, if the homeowner buys a product they usually get too much and when it doesn’t work they go back for more. The pro however knows to buy the variety they need so it’s not unusual for them to walk out of a distributors warehouse with a small box of assorted goodies that just set them back $500.00 so either way huge bucks are invested in getting rid of bugs.
The other major factor in german roach populations is sanitation and this includes moisture control. Sloppy homes and businesses offer the roach everything it needs. Places to nest, food and almost always moisture. These 3 elements are the key to a roach thriving and breeding at optimum pace. Reduce even one of these factors and you will put stress on the population and begin to see dramatic changes the same day. The biggest life sustaining force for a roach is water, if you have leaky plumbing or excess sweat on the pipes under your sinks you will have a real hard time getting to zero population. Make it your mission to knock out these 3 elements and keep it maintained even if you have to do it one at a time. I guarantee you’ll be pleased with the results.
For further explanation of the german roach and why they are so hard to manage please see my articles, 5 hiding spots revealed by a german roach and 100% of the people can get rid of 95% of the german roaches.
To get a taste of what out of control german roaches looks like I shot a video with my phone today of a roach job that I wasn’t expecting to be this bad. The client that called me had set foggers off 3 times and still you can see the amount of roaches that were living happy go lucky. In a month we’ll be going back to that home and at that time I hope to show you what a difference calling in a pro makes.
