If you’ve seen the recent news articles on roaches, you might be feeling pretty horrified right now. Reports have been circulating that roaches have become “immune” to pesticides. So does that mean we all must resign ourselves to world overrun by superbugs? Luckily, the situation isn’t quite that dire.
The problem mainly concerns German cockroaches. So if you spot another species of roach in your house, they aren’t likely to be as difficult to eradicate. But even if you do encounter German roaches, don’t rush to pack up and move away just yet!
These bugs aren’t exactly immune to pesticides, but colonies do tend to build up a tolerance to certain chemicals over time. The bad news is that when this happens, that tolerance can extend to every other pesticide in that class of chemicals. The good news is, the tolerance does not usually extend to other classes. So our first approach will be to switch to an entirely different class of pesticides and try those.
Another thing to remember is that tolerance does not equal complete immunity. There’s a good chance that many members of your roach population are still susceptible to the original pesticide. So we can often use a one-two punch to knock them out, by using two different pesticides and delivery methods.
And third, roach baits are still doing the trick. Roaches carry the bait back to their nests, where they spread it among themselves. This is a good approach because you don’t even need to get to the nest yourself; the roaches will do the work for you.
Do remember that if you spot one roach in your home, there are likely more that you can’t see (in the walls, floors, and so on). So take action immediately, before they have a chance to reproduce and overwhelm you. Give us a call right away, and we’ll target them with an aggressive approach so that you can bypass the trial-and-error method.