How to eliminate crawling insects from your home?
Insects can fly, jump, or crawl to move around. However, most insects that are regarded as pests in homes are the crawling insects’ types. Just think about the cockroaches, ants, bugs, earwigs, and centipedes that invade homes, and you’ll understand how many of these crawling insects people face in their residential and commercial spaces.
Crawling insects can cause great discomfort and structural damage to your property, depending on the type that infest your home. Some of them can even transmit some serious diseases to you and your pets through their bites or direct contact with the contaminated items. Therefore, it’s crucial to learn about these crawling insects, the most common crawling insects people face, and of course, how best to control them.
In this article, you’ll learn about the five most common types of crawling insects and the best solution to crawling insect invasion.
What are Crawling Insects?
Crawling insects are just like every other insect that you know. They also have an exoskeleton with three-segmented body parts (head, thorax, and abdomen). They have six legs and often one or two pairs of wings. However, what distinguishes crawling insects from other insects is their crawling behavior.
Crawling insects move around mainly by crawling to find food, water, and shelter. It’s noteworthy to mention that only a small percentage of crawling insects in the home are regarded as pests. However, this small percentage is more than enough to take control of your home from you if you allow it.
What Are the Types of Crawling Insects?
There are many types and species of crawling insects. The ones perceived by humans as pests are of interest in this article. With this in mind, we’ll cover only the four most common crawling insects that invade homes. They include:
- Ants
Ants are crawling insects that are present everywhere. They are among the most commonly-faced pest issues by homeowners and business owners. Ants are notorious for constituting nuisance than causing damage. However, they can still sting, and a few of them can bite you and your pets, causing pain and allergic reactions.
There are over 22,000 species of classified ants worldwide, out of which only a few of them is regarded as insect pests. The most common ants known to invade homes and gardens include carpenter ants, pavement ants, odorous house ants, and field ants. They are all social insects and typically form a large colony, consisting of a queen, female workers, and males in their nest.
- Centipedes
Centipedes are another crawling insects that invade homes. There is a common misconception that a centipede has one hundred legs. There’s no centipede with exactly one hundred legs, to clear the misconception. Instead, these crawling insects usually have one pair of legs per body segment with a varying number of legs, ranging from fifteen to seventy total pairs on average.
Centipedes usually have flat, elongated bodies about one-sixth to six and a half inches in length. Their colors vary, but centipedes with shades of brown, red, and orange are more common out there. Centipedes usually invade homes in the fall to seek shelter indoor and hunt for food.
House centipedes prefer to stay in cool and damp areas in your home. They move fast when spotted, searching for a safe place to hide from being killed (all thanks to their lots of legs). House centipedes are dangerous when they live close to you because they can bite you, injecting you with their venom and causing mild pain and swelling.
- Cockroaches
Cockroaches are one of the most serious insect pests that invade homes worldwide. These crawling insects are known carriers of the pathogens that cause serious diseases and infections such as Salmonellosis, Dysentery, Cholera, Typhoid Fever, Leprosy, Listeriosis, Giardia, Campylobacteriosis, and Gastroenteritis.
Roaches can contaminate food and surfaces with their droppings and saliva. They can also spread E. coli, staphylococcus aureus, and streptococcus. Consuming food and using/touching items that cockroaches have contaminated can expose you to significant health risks.
You should get rid of any cockroach you can find in your home quickly if you don’t want to risk the chance of contracting a disease from a cockroach.
- Bed bugs
Bed bugs are another crawling insects that can be in homes. They are tiny insects with flat backs similar to a beetle or tick. Tiny crawling bugs hide well in mattresses, inside the cracks in bed frames, under the carpet, and in other places with small cracks and gaps in your home.
Crawling bugs typically bite and suck human blood, causing itchy red bumps on their hosts’ skin. They remain in the areas where they can access a human host and can even live for up to a year without food. They’re not carriers of disease-causing organisms (unlike cockroaches), so they don’t transmit diseases. Instead, they inflict painful bites that may sometimes require urgent medical attention.
Bed bugs infest homes, hotels, shops, and hospitals. You could pick them up from sitting down on public transport where they can crawl inside your clothes and travel with you down to your home.
Why DIY Methods of Getting Rid of Crawling Insects Should Not Be Encouraged?
There are many preventive, Do-it-yourself (DIY) measures to take to keep crawling insects out of your home. However, these measures won’t be enough to deal with the issues associated with these invaders when they get indoors in large numbers.
- They come in large numbers
Ants live in huge colonies and hundreds of thousands of them can invade your home at once. With this sheer number, it can be nearly impossible to eliminate every ants that make their way indoors with DIY methods. Sure, you can kill a dozen or even a few hundreds of them with your consumer pesticides, but not all. Consumer pesticides and other spray homeowners use to get rid of ant invasion are not potent enough and their repeated use can make your ant problem untreatable because ants can easily develop immunity against them.
- DIY methods could be dangerous
Centipedes possess maxillipeds, which they use to bite and inject venom into their victims. Their bites can sometimes be extremely painful (depending on the species) and may result to nausea, sweating, swelling, or even fever. Therefore, you shouldn’t attempt to handle your centipede infestation yourself if you want to steer clear of their poisonous bites.
- Crawling insects easily develop immunity to low-quality insecticides
Cockroaches and bed bugs possess strong exoskeleton and have advanced immune systems. These features allow them to resist typical insecticides that people use at home or office to eliminate cockroaches and bed bugs. Thus, they become so hard to eliminate on your own once they develop immunity.
How to Get Rid of Crawling Insects from Your Home Once and For All
If you’re faced with crawling insect problems in your home, Provincial Pest Control (PPC) is your best solution. We’re a pest control company in Canada that offers expert-level pest control services in the major cities and towns across Canada.
Provincial Pest Control provides free crawling insects inspection for homes and offices across Canada. We offer effective residential and commercial pest control solutions for Canadians in Ottawa, Ontario, Toronto, Vaughan, and the nearby cities and towns. Our team will enlighten you on what crawling insect killer to use and the DIY preventive measures that work best for these pest types. We can recommend a customized solution to help solve your pest problems and permanently prevent their return. You can request for our free inspection here.
