Tuesday was a very hot day – beyond 25 degrees, lots of sun and blue sky – in short, it was wonderful! Unfortunately, it did have some effect on those house guests of mine as well…
It seems that at least one of the three cockroaches I killed a few weeks ago has laid at least one egg somewhere in my office, and it seems that even though I had cleaned the room thoroughly (or I thought I had), I did not find and remove the egg(s) after all. The hot weather on Tuesday apparently brought the egg(s) to hatch, and I have since killed just under 10 baby cockroaches.
They are maybe 5 mm long, and from a distance they resemble ants. Only when you come closer will you notice that there’s a light stripe across their black back, and then you see that it’s indeed a bug and not an ant. At this point, they are still small enough so you can simply squish them with a kleenex or so, but since they mostly move at night when I am not around, I decided to try something else.
I am still not a big fan of dusting my apartment with poison, but I did buy a box of “cockroach houses”. (I always wanted to be a landlady…) Those are little cardboard boxes with a very sticky “floor” (even for humans the glue is very strong); you put some very stinky bait in the middle of that floor, and then you put the box together and place it wherever you suspect a cockroach nest to be. I have put one underneath the fridge where it is warm, and one into that corner of my office where I have seen and killed most of the cockroaches in the last two days.
The idea is that the insects smell the bait, literally walk up to it, and then stick to the floor where they die. I am now cleaning my kitchen even more thoroughly, so that the cockroaches will find the bait more enticing. So far, no catch, but who knows how many of those insects are still around in my apartment. To be honest, I am now carefully scanning my office floor every now and then, and I shudder whenever I detect something that looks like a black speck anywhere. I still like to think they don’t make it into my bedroom (which is not true of course); remember that I am sleeping on the floor…
The bad news is that it is getting colder now, and the cockroaches will start to hibernate. It is very likely that I won’t catch any more now, but that they will simply wake up again when it gets warmer again in spring. Well, as long as they don’t grow while sleeping…