When confronted with the many irritations brought on by the insect kingdom, there is often little we can do to preserve our comfort and even less that we can do that is not toxic. For both of these reasons we have been won over once again to the simplicity and effectiveness that is the sticky fly strip.
A few days ago our kitchen was a teeming fly city, but only hours after putting up two sticky fly ribbons, they were stuck fast and out of the way. It may not seem very sightly or humane, but, hey, it works really well and they're flies!
Uh oh Maxwell, get ready for an onslaught of posters telling you how sad they are that you're killing things with faces. It doesn't take much to make this group cry.
I worked in an office once plagued by swarms of fruit flies. We put up these little contraptions everywhere. In not too long the flies were keen to the traps and the office turned into one ugly sticky mess.
A more eco friendly and cheap solution: Mix dish soap and apple vinegar in a dish or cup. The flies are attracted to the vinegar smell but the soap traps them. The concoction is definitely less intrusive and more effective.
Just curious to know if anyone has ever put these up behind, say, a stove or another piece of furniture in order to attract and trap cockroaches. I cringe just writing that word - cockroaches - but wondered if anyone had tried it.
matt,
my husband and I distributed those glue traps around our apartment when we were battling roaches last year. We came home one night and found a bug running along the baseboard, headed right for a glue trap, and though "Ha! now we've got you!"; but alas, the bug ran right over the thing as if it were a skating rink. Now, this was a southern roach of unusual size, so the glue traps might do the trick for small, urban roaches. A good non-toxic solution for trapping roaches is used coffee grounds mixed with a little water in an old mayo jar...
As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods;
They kill us for their sport.
-Shakespeare, King Lear
I used a sticky fly ribbon on the piece of wire that I hang my hummingbird feeder with . To keep the ants away. Worlk great
Matt, look for roach bait stations, preferrably with the active ingredient avermectin, but probably most actives work. Put out lots--under the fridge, under the stove, in cabinets, behind wherever. It takes maybe a week to clear out most of the roaches, so you need to be patient, but they work like gangbusters.
Best of all, while they work on the roaches you have, they won't actually attract them from the next apartment. And as long as they have bait left in them, they keep working to control any newcomers. Most bait manufacturers put an appetite suppressant in the product so the roaches eat enough to die, but don't overeat; that makes the bait stations last longer.
The reason to put out lots of stations is that roaches won't travel more than several feet usually in search of food, so you want them easily found. The other thing you need to do is clean up crumbs and garbage and other food sources, but you're probably already doing this.
Why do I know all this arcane stuff? I used to work for an ad agency that had a client who makes pest control products.
Oh yeah, been using them for years in our shop, gets a little nutty when a dragon fly gets temporarily stuck to one though. Top ten old time inventions that need no improvement.
I wish that would work for me. We have "House Centipede's"
harmless but oh, so ugly.