askchapo

Use diatomaceous earth to combat bugs without introducing a ton of chemicals

A few fruit flies in your kitchen is okay, maybe like one normal fly or a spider occasionally. The rare carpet beetle or two showing up depending on weather is fine as well.

If you're seeing cockroaches or moths or beetles, or like a ton of fruit flies, you have a problem.

I'd say that's a big problem. For every bug you see there's at least a dozen more you didn't. Having pest control come in has varying levels of disruption and difficulty depending on how they're treating, but the bigger problem is that in a lot of buildings (I used to live in one such building, and I suspect you might as well) the bugs are in the walls of the entire building, so you're fighting an impossible uphill battle. If you come to the conclusion that's the case, you kind of just have to move yeah, which I know isn't easy, but it's an unfortunate reality. I'm sorry you have to deal with this comrade.

Honesltly I dunno. german roaches are very hard to kill. Can't say on the other critters if you can't ID them. Like silverfish aren't much of a problem unless they're eating your books, but carpenter ants are a big problem.

If you want to try an "organic" solution try paying neighborhood kids to bring you house centipedes (the gnarly ones with giant legs) and various spiders. idk if house centipedes can tackle a german cockroach but they'll eat everything smaller than that very efficiently.

ground floor in an old building is the big reason you're seeing so many tbh, so its not entirely out of the ordinary, but roaches are personally where I draw the line (I'm from a climate where they're less common tho). Worth trying to deal with the roaches and whatever's biting you (I still think bedbugs, they're very sneaky fuckers), but yeah if you can't get it to a manageable level on your own its probably just a good reason to move when the lease is up.

Your landlord might call pest control for you, but they might also not, or might try to blame you for the bugs for reporting it, there's just such a wide range of shitbags out there...

What you need is a cat that likes hunting cockroaches. I recently adopted a stray who is thoroughly an indoors lady but she goes bananas over cockroaches. I usually see the big wood roaches occasionally, maybe once or twice a week. This cat's been in the house for like two months and now the only time I see a roach is if she's leaping around tossing one or if she leaves one on the floor in the bathroom as a trophy.

Check your local laws. In a lot of places infestations are the responsibility of the landlord and if you want it dealt with you might not be on the hook.

Depends on what kind of bugs! For some kinds of bugs, having 200k of them in my apartment would make me quite happy.

There are lots of different levels of cockroach activity. If you've ever been in a place that's had an out-of-control roach infestation for a while, you'll be familiar with the smell- not just of the bodies but the frass (looks like coarse ashy black dust) too. If you can smell it then there's a major problem. If you can't smell or see it then it may be at an okay level.

If you frequently wake up with bugs, try sleeping on an air mattress or something, in sheets and clothes that have all been washed and kept sterile, on a section of the floor that you've blocked off with diatomaceous earth in every direction. If the bites don't happen in a few nights of that, then you have a crawling bloodsucking insect problem.

The biggest issue is food and habitat. Every indoor environment is an ecosystem. If it makes sense for their populations to live there, they're going to, and any pest control is going to be an uphill battle.

• Cockroaches like dark damp places, so if you have any leaks, they'll flock to those. If you have any standing water they will find it. If there's a leak in the walls of a stick-frame construction, the damp plywood can harbor them basically indefinitely. You can make your own traps with smooth enough conic-section 32oz soup containers: leave the lid on, cut the bottom off, oil the inside rim, place it upside down with bait on the lid. There are lots of pest control products for roaches. Don't get the endocrine inhibitors, it won't satisfactorily solve your problem; you want the straight killers like emamectin.

• Flies like rotting and fermenting stuff. They'll land on it, but if it's all liquid, like a jar with vinegar sugar water, they'll drown in it. This control measure can be combined with fly strips which are pretty cheap.

• Moths like tight fibrous things, especially with a carbohydrate source, even more so if that source is damp or humid. Many of them will go away if you have one of those UV bug zapper bulbs/lights.

General stuff to keep a lot of pests out includes limiting the humidity, keeping all kitchen waste in a sealed container, keeping all carpets vacuumed and all smooth floors mopped, not leaving doors open, and making sure all window screens are intact and cracks are sealed. Unfortunately in most conventional housing, every seam has cracks and many aren't reachable.

Some things like spiders will curb the population of other arthropods. Centipedes will too, but they make most people (myself included) squeamish.

If you don't have pests, you should put borax in crannies and around edges before you do anything else. Ants and roaches will eat it, carry it back to the hive, die, and be eaten by their kin restarting the cycle. Between that and more effective food storage, my 100+ y/o apartment became bug free in about a week from being at about twice the level of yuckiness you described.

Just want to throw in that if there's any available way for you to handle insect infestations without bug bombing or fumigation you should try those first. Those kill everything in the house, yes, but it wipes out all the predators of the pest insects you hate. Those predators take much longer to replenish than the pest insects, and so your next wave of pests will be much bigger without those biological controls.

I'd be sealing holes if cockroaches are getting in. I get the occasional stinkbug or boxelder bug, sometimes one of them thicc ants will just be randomly walking across my floor.

If there's any food waste/bins without tight lids that's most likely what's attracting the flies and such. I had a potato go bad in the back of a drawer and couldn't figure out what was attracting little gnats for a few days. You can get rid of them pretty quickly with a bowl of hot water+sugar (powdered if you have it)+dish soap left on the counter.

You can buy a 12 pack of roach motels for like $10, they last for 6 months and you'll see roaches disappear from the area within a few days. I would assume anything that flies is getting in through cracks/rips in the window screens, you could always get fly tape but gets gross real quick, I usually just try to catch them or shoo them out an open window/door.

Pest control is the landlords responsibility. Usually big landlords want to take care of a roach infestation because it can spread to other apartments and become a much more expensive issue.

If you live in an apartment building, they could be coming from some neighbor who has a bad infestation. In that case you need the landlord to deal with it because extermination won't stop them from coming back unless they treat every apartment.

Someone correct me if I’m wrong but it is the landlords responsibility to provide a clean habitable environment? I would probably pull a Karen and make them put you in a hotel while they fumigate, maybe get in touch with a local tenants union if there is one.

I would get some boric acid (borax if you can't get your hands on boric acid).

Mix peanut butter with powdered sugar and boric acid. Idk the exact quantities but there's info online. Place this into small dishes like the lids of bottles. If you have pets or small children who can access this stuff, try using small metal containers like mint tins with small holes in them instead in order to keep them safer.

Distribute the peanut butter mixture into corners and crevices. Under the couch, behind the fridge, beside the oven. That sort of thing. Try to put them near where you see the insects most and around any areas where you do food prep or have food waste.

The peanut butter will attract most insects because it's high in protein and it's oily. Adding sugar will attract insects that are attracted to sweet food, such as certain types of ant. The bait won't dry out and it won't go mouldy unless it gets wet.

If you have a particular spot that is a problem, consider leaving diatomaceous earth in that area. DE needs a little bit of caution and you have to handle it approximately so it's not necessarily suitable for all applications especially if you have kids or pets. Check info online if you intend to use DE.

For the small flies it's going to depend on what type they are. Drain flies are common around wet areas and they are just a nuisance but nothing to be overly concerned about. Cleaning your drains should mostly address this. Other flies like fruit flies and vinegar flies are attracted to food waste and getting rid of them requires removing food waste, keeping fresh fruit in the fridge while you deal with an infestation, and keeping your trash and compost bins covered while remembering to empty them frequently.

You can make simple traps for fruit flies and vinegar flies by putting some fruit juice like apple juice into a wide, shallow dish and mixing a drop or two of dishwashing liquid into it. The dishwashing liquid is a surfactant that changes the surface tension of the liquid so any flies that touch it will end up sinking and drowning themselves. You can get more elaborate with a trap like this or you can use vinegar (especially wine vinegar or apple cider vinegar) to target vinegar flies specifically.

You can also make or buy little inverted cones to put into the neck of a bottle which has some of the above to lure in flies but preventing them from escaping. A small funnel will probably work just as well. This will make the trap much less prone to drying out and it will be better as a sort of preventative measure or a longer term measure once the initial infestation has been dealt a solid blow.

Most pest control amounts to taking these steps to prevent/manage infestations. They use different chemicals and stuff but they will probably do essentially the same thing. If you have a major infestation like where you have cockroaches coming from the walls then you need pest control because a few traps and being more diligent with food waste isn't going to fix the problem but most minor-moderate infestations can be fixed with DIY solutions, which it sounds like your situation.

If your place is 100 years old you're gonna get bugs. It's impossible to seal the envelope.

Roaches are an issue though for sure and likely comes from one of your neighbors being nasty.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yi5wDPZdZ4A

We keep spiders in our apartment for the flies control. Usually don't kill any insects, they're awesome.