bugs

Get some cockroach gell bait and some insect monitor glue traps. For gel bait, I recommend Advion Trio. You can get a pack of 4 tubes on Amazon for 50$. For sticky traps I dont think the brand really matters.

You will want to apply a very small amount of gel bait for each spot (think the head of a pin- tiny little beads of bait), but with several spots. Large globs of bait are less effective than the same amount of bait spread out over smaller pips. You will want to put these pips in dark hidden places where cockroaches will like to roam searching for food. If they’re in your kitchen, for example, put tiny dots in the recesses of cabinet door hinges, along the tops of the rails of drawers, around the openings in the cabinetry under sinks where the pipes go into/under the house. Feel free to put a dot or two in the center of the glue traps as well.

This should be enough to take care of newer/smaller nests, but it will take time to get rid of the problem completely. That would be true even if you had it done professionally. Anything short of a full-blown clean out would see a gradual reduction in activity over time until the problem ceases.

If your problem is really bad, if you’re seeing them all over the place or in the daytime, and especially if you’re finding them across multiple stages of life, you may also want to get some kind of growth regulator. A growth regulator, as the name implies, affects the healthy maturing of target pests. They won’t directly kill the target, but they will break the lifecycle by preventing nymphal stages from maturing into sexually reproductive adults. The affected individual may still make it to adulthood, but they will be unable to reproduce. For ease of use, I recommend gentrol point source roach control devices. They’re little pucks that you can place on walls or in cabinets, etc, where roaches will crawl over them and become inundated with the growth regulator. They are available on Amazon for a bit over $40 for a box of 20 devices.

If you do this yourself, a few extra bits of advice which may seem like common sense, but bear stating:

Wear gloves. Ideally, disposable ones. Neither of the products I recommended are particularly toxic to humans, they are labeled for general use (as opposed to restricted use, which requires a license. This classification may vary by location, but where I am, they are labeled for general use) But it’s always best practice to keep the stuff off of you.

Read the labels and follow the instructions to the letter.