Insect Free Home - Part I

The housewarming ceremony is over. Your family and you enter the dream house. You feel you are the sole owner of the house with your loved ones. But wait! There are some others who wait to claim the absolute ownership of your house. Here they are waiting to wake you up from sleep during peaceful nights through their painful pricks through bed sheets and mosquito music. They will taste your favorite dishes and bottled delicacies even before you touch them. To add up all these they will build their own houses inside your home and under that expensive Italian furniture. They are insects and the owners of Earth even before human species was born.

Insects in your home can be divided into 6 categories as Insects that contaminate your food, Insects that damage your textiles and costumes, Insects that damage books and paper, Insects that damage furniture and timber, household ants and insects that suck your blood. Since poisons and bug bombs can cause serious it would be difficult to seek their help always. Here are some natural methods to control insects at your home.

The major and common insects that contaminate your food are cockroaches and houseflies

Cockroaches are the most common insects in any household. They usually live in the cavities like the cavity between cupboard panel and wall, cavities under washbasins, fridge or stove etc. Cockroaches are very difficult to control since their natural life span is two years and a female cockroach lays at least 12-24 eggs a month. They contaminate food and will pop up inside your drinks also.

One of the best natural remedies for getting rid of cockroaches is Diatomaceous Earth (DE), which is a finely milled fossilized shells of minuscule organisms called diatoms. DE will desiccate the cockroach's exoskeleton upon contact and the pests dehydrate and die within hours.

You can mix together sugar and baking soda and spray it on the cockroach-infected areas. Cockroaches will eat the sugar and at the same time baking soda will mess up their stomachs and ultimately kill them.

Bay laurel leaves repel cockroaches. You can buy them at grocery stores (cooking herb) or buy a bay laurel plant and scatter leaves in cupboards, etc.

Boric acid eats the body of the insect, and they can never become immune to that. You just need to sprinkle the powder where they walk.

You can also sprinkle the boric acid on soggy crackers and put them on cabinets and other cockroach-infected areas. Cockroaches will eat the crackers ingesting the acid and they will carry the boric acid to their nests, therefore killing the other cockroaches also.

You can sprinkle Cedarcide granules around your house and in the garden to repel the cockroaches.

The cockroach balls will easily kill the roaches. You have to make little balls with the paste of 1 cup borax, 1/4 cup granulated sugar, 1/4 cup chopped onion, 1 tablespoon cornstarch, 1 tablespoon water. The onion scent of these balls will attract the cockroaches to eat them and they will take the balls outside the nests. The other cockroaches will eat the carcasses and so on.

Ensign wasps are natural enemies to cockroaches and prey upon the egg cases of cockroaches. You have to consider this fly as a friend and not as a foe.

Houseflies breed on garbage, dirt, composts, human and animal waste and rotten things. The female lays four to five batches of 100-120 eggs each and it will take five days for the eggs to hatch and develop. Houseflies can spread diseases like malaria, dengue fever, etc. Here are some easy steps to control insects.

You can wipe the floor and dining table with salt water. This will prevent the flies from perching on those areas.

A simple flytrap is easy to make. You can keep a jar with a hole on the lid. The hole must be small enough for the fly to enter the jar. You can keep a piece of sweet or rotten meat inside the jar. Once the houseflies are inside the trap, they cannot find the way out from their trap.

Since mothballs and sweet clover repel the houseflies effectively, you can hang it in a mesh or net bags near the doors and windows.

Houseflies are repelled by basil. You can plant it around the house and at the kitchen doorsill.

A difficult equipment to control the houseflies is fly strip. Mix together a quarter cup of syrup and a couple of tablespoons of sugar (preferably brown sugar). Cut strips from brown paper bags or other sturdy paper put a hole and a string to hang them with. Paste the strips with the mixture. Put them on wax paper or other non-absorbent surface and allow the mixture to soak in for several hours before hanging. The houseflies will be attracted to the sugar and as soon as they land on the paper, they will get pasted to the paper.

The methods to get rid of Insects that damage your textiles and costumes, Insects that damage books and paper, Insects that damage furniture and timber, household ants and insects that suck your blood, will be discussed in detail in the following articles.