When springtime breaks through, you want to get out and enjoy more sunshine and warm weather while pests start regarding the warm season as the perfect time to start entering your house. Having no pest control is enough to make someone want to move house.
When it comes to pest control, poisons that work on one insect might not work on another type, as specific poisons work on specific insects. To get rid of pests, you first need to know where they are coming from. You also want to know which form of insecticide to use, be it solid, liquid, aerosol, or granule. For example, adult mosquitoes are best combated with aerosol sprays while crawling insects are best treated with surface powders, sprays, or granules for dermal and/or oral entry.
It’s normal to just grab a can of insecticide and spray an entire room to get rid of pests. Yet, that harms you, your family, and your pets at the same time. In addition, while you’re spraying up to kill flying insects, the ground can have an army of crawling insects hiding, protected from the spray. Eventually, too much of one thing can cause insects to become immune. After all, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. In the long run, pests may develop a tolerance to chemicals. When it comes to pests, you need both a short and long-term solution.
Being serious about their attempt to go green, people want to lessen their carbon footprint and use ingredients that are naturally sourced or harmless to humans and the environment to get rid of home pests.
To win the battle against bugs, start equipping your home with these items:
Essential Oils
We know they are used in beauty creams, lotions, and the like, but some of these essential oils are surprisingly effective in getting rid of pests. For instance, ants, beetles, fleas, and flies can’t stand the smell of peppermint oil and can be repelled by it. Lavender oil works effectively against mosquitoes, fleas, flies, and chiggers. Oils are safe to smell and touch and are well-tolerated by most humans, but always keep them out of the reach of children.
Boric Acid
For every roach you can see, you can bet there are dozens of others you can’t see. During a female roach’s lifetime, she can produce an average of 150 eggs. There are more than 4,000 species of cockroaches. While no bugs are particularly welcomed into a home, roaches must be one of the least welcomed because they breed and spread so fast and are not easy to get rid of.
However, using boric acid can prove to be one of the best solutions to get rid of roaches. Boric acid is created from a combination of water and boron. When used properly, this combination can effectively kill cockroaches and numerous other pests like fleas, ants, sowbugs, and spiders. Roaches exposed to this might alive stay for a while with the ability to continue moving around, but they’re actually absorbing and ingesting the poison. They’re also taking it back to their nests and to the locations where they lay their eggs.
Food-based Solutions
If you like your food spicy, you can save some of that spice, like cayenne or chili pepper for bugs that don’t like it and find the smell offensive. Exposure to such spices can be fatal for bugs. Pepper can be boiled with some water and placed in a spray bottle to be used in areas where you see bugs appearing.
Citrus fruits may also work pretty well. While many of them can be found in essential oils, you can also use the peel of oranges, lemons, and grapefruits. For pests that are more commonly found inside houses, try using sage, patchouli, and thyme.
Electronic Items
An electronic mosquito killer can give you a relaxing night out on your lawn or in your garden. These devices attract mosquitos and immediately kill them when they come in contact with an electrified grid. Other items can include ultrasonic devices and ones that emit radio waves. It’s a way to control pests without having any adverse effects. Yet, minus electronic mosquito killers, the efficiency of devices is often questioned.
Pests are always unwanted guests, and there are ways to repel and completely eradicate them. Before they get the better of you, if your home is infested by bugs, try some of these remedies. In the future, keeping your home clean is a must, and sealing off areas where pests are most likely to enter, such as cracks as well as areas around the front doors, windows, and chimneys will help keep the little buggers at bay.